The second in our series Learning in Public is an interview with the people behind Index, a network of co-working and community spaces with roots in New York and locations all over the world.

Index is particularly interesting, I think, for its peer-led programming and its funding structure. We get into both of these things below, but I’ll try to set up the structure a bit here, since there’s a lot at play: The people behind Index are also part of garden3d, which is a worker-owned creative collective made up of the design studio XXIX, the technology studio Sanctuary Computer, the sustainability strategy company Seaborne, and the digital design studio Manhattan Hydraulics. As garden3d, these studios work together in various constellations on client projects, produce their own products, and share their profits (I’m a fan of their profit share calculator, and in general, their commitment to financial transparency).

During the pandemic, garden3d set up a platform for educational programming they called Index, which they decided to make into a physical space when things opened back up. The collective put forward the money for the buildout and subsidized the first six months (detailed nicely by Index director Elie Andersen here). Index Chinatown opened in 2023 and is now self-sustaining. Just last month, Index expanded to a sister location in Greenpoint.

In 2024, garden3d’s Sam Taylor started an Index-offshoot called Ours in Richmond, VA, funded similarly to Index. Once a year, garden3d also gives a one-time $20k grant to a winning proposal in order for a person or group to open a space in their local community. They call these spaces Nodes, and they are currently in the U.S., the Netherlands, India, and Japan. I talked to Elie Andersen, director of Index, Sam Taylor, director of Ours, and Hugh Francis, founder of garden3d, to talk about Index and this growing network of community spaces.

Meg Miller: Where is everyone working right now?

**Elie Andersen: **I am in a small meeting room in the new Index space in Greenpoint.

**Hugh Francis: **We’re a few minutes late because I was lifting a couple of heavy chairs up to the third floor, which didn’t fit in our elevator [laughs]. Now I’m walking down the street in Greenpoint.

Sam Taylor: I’m at Ours in Richmond, Virginia.

**Elie: **Where are you Meg?

Meg: I am also in Richmond and today I am also at Ours. I live and work in the neighborhood and Sam invited me over to do this conversation. I’m one room over from Sam [laughs].

So the New York folks are in Greenpoint getting everything ready to open up a new Index, a second branch to the Index in Manhattan, where, full disclosure, Are.na has a desk. I think the simplest, one-line, “explaining it to your parents’ friends” way of describing Index is that it’s a kind of hybrid coworking and community space — people work there during the day and then it opens up into a more communal, event and workshop space during the evenings and weekends. There are also several sister locations to Index, like Ours, that similarly received a grant from your creative collective garden3d, but are located all over the world and run somewhat independently.

Coworking has a kind of specific connotation these days and I don’t know that it really captures the ethos of what you guys have been doing. What would you add to that description?

**Elie: **For a while I was really allergic to the word coworking because of certain corporate connotations. We were trying out “shared studio” and words like that, and after about a year, I realized that it didn’t really matter. As soon as you step into the space, you realize that it wasn’t a corporate coworking space. You pick up on all the signs and symbols that tell you that this is a space where people care about each other and where there are real relationships being built besides just the sort of the formal transactions of people working independently next to each other. For instance, several businesses and projects have started through people who have met at Index. It’s not a space where people are just coming in, plugging in, putting their headphones on, and doing their own thing. It’s really a dynamic space in addition to being a place of focus and calm where you can just come and get things done.

I feel like I’ve really relaxed around that definition, and that word in particular. It’s no longer repulsive [laughs]. The description of Index in writing might always be a little mismatched to the experience of being in the space or being at an event here. We’re just grateful that we have enough people who have come and participated that we don’t need to worry about it that much.

**Hugh: **I think generally, the ideas of places like WeWork in the early days were directionally good. What we saw as a problem was that most of those early ideas were co-opted by venture capital and turned into this profit machinery that ultimately was selling the individual as the product. It was sort of selling that forward to the next person who wants to be a part of this hustle culture that was a very 2010s thing. But the core ideas of coworking we still find directionally good — getting together a great community, making things with people that you love, and doing that in a physical space where ideas can bounce around freely.

**Meg: **There’s also the events and programming aspect, which you can attend and engage with even if you aren’t a member and don’t have a desk there.

Elie: We actually launched Index during the pandemic. So even before we had a physical space we started offering educational programs, like coding classes, animation classes, and writing workshops. This was to give people something to do, for one thing, and also share knowledge within and between the community. What was cool about that was that we started growing an audience based throughout the world, not just centered in New York. I think that made it a lot easier to open the space than it would’ve been if we hadn’t been holding events and bringing people in before signing a lease. Also, without really meaning to, events have also become a core part of the reason Index’s business has been successful, because in a way they work as organic marketing. We don’t think of them like that, but that is how it works, and it’s a big reason why we’ve been able to continue to grow and open more spaces.

There’s a fluid symbiosis between those different aspects of Index. The coworking provides the professional space for you to engage and grow a career while the events hopefully satisfy an ongoing personal development. Index is also not a fixed thing, it’s more like a vessel or an infrastructure. It’s not the same every day. It changes in the shape of its members.

**Meg: **I’m curious about how you think about community as a thing in flux, something that’s living and evolving. You can set the framework, but then there’s sort of varying levels of control you have over how it actually unfolds and develops. We think about this all the time with Are.na, too. I guess I’m curious, especially with an in-person space, how you handle that sort of healthy tension between setting up the infrastructure intentionally and then just letting things happen inside of it.

**Hugh: **Sam, maybe you have something to say about this. The space that Sam runs is called Ours, it’s not called index, and that nods to a very intentional thing about how we build spaces, which is that we want them to be responsive to the locality that they’re in. One of the things that the corporate coworking spaces of yesteryear did poorly, in our view, is they would just pop WeWorks cookie cutter style all around the globe and think the design works for everybody. Alongside Ours, Index has sibling spaces that we’ve funded in Amsterdam, Bangalore in India, and in a rural farming community on the west coast of Japan. We’re funding a sauna in Mexico City currently. All of these spaces have an important central focus of locality and responding to the needs of the community.

**Sam: **I would say that there’s a blueprint around hospitality that’s core to the Index ethos. This encourages people who are excited about being a great host — who enjoy inviting folks to things and inviting folks into a process — to pitch starting their own Node.

At Ours, there’s a lot of warmth and character. Richmond has so much history and depth, which is reflected in the culture and the mix of folks who end up showing up to the space. Because of that, this space — even in the namesake — is built around collectivity and what it means to gather and get people together to work on something as a unit. Instead of thinking of ourselves as workers who work for an individual company in a remote way, a lot of folks feel connected to Ours in a way that means there can be co-stewardship in how the space is run and operated and how we bring life to the space.

In practice, we regularly host communal lunches for members, where everyone brings a treat to share and good energy, leaving with deeper connections. Sandbox is another example, a night where people work alongside each other in a shared, focused environment. Programming across the space, including peer-led workshops in topics like songwriting, theater, design, printmaking, and photography, is member-led and peer-informed, allowing members to shape the culture of the space. Collaborative kitchen sessions, making drinks or meals together, and everyday acts like organizing supplies, welcoming new members, or helping with events all reinforce a sense of co-stewardship.

Hugh: We also require all of the “Nodes” — or spaces — in the network to have complete financial transparency with all of their members. At Index in Manhattan, and soon to be Greenpoint, we run a Town Hall every quarter where we do a full breakdown of the profit and loss statement with the entire member membership group. We allow people to ask questions. We allow people to understand why we might have to rent the space for an event on a weekday, when really they would prefer that we won’t interrupt their workspace. We bring them into all of that decision making.

The outcome is that we have a group of people who are super invested in every decision that we make. There’s a recursive feedback loop that is grounded in the fact that we are showing folks that we are not extracting and profiting from them. Rather, we’re just doing our very best to steward this space to the best ability we can. I feel strongly that financial transparency is a form of putting our money where our mouth is and reflecting back to the community that we’re here for the long-term, and we’re doing this because we want to see it exist. There’s no ulterior motive.

Elie: All of us are first time business operators. Hugh was a first time business operator years before Sam and I, but all of us were learning how to run a business by running a business. One thing that I’ve taken from the Town Halls and our culture of financial transparency at Index is it’s just so much easier to run a financially transparent business, in my opinion, because you have to do everything above board. It forces you to make much more solid decisions because you have to explain them to people. I would definitely recommend that for anybody who’s running a business for the first time: try to run your books in a way that other people could understand them, because that’s a good way of making sure that I’m doing things in a safe way for our business.

**Meg: **I wanted to ask you guys about scale as you’re opening this new space. Could you talk a bit about how these spaces come about and are funded, and how you think about scale as you continue to grow?

**Hugh: **At the end of the day, the way that we think about scale is thinking about who out there in the world is aligned to us philosophically — let’s put this signal out into the world and see if they want to make a space. We feel pretty strongly that just about anyone can learn financial literacy. It’s really not that tough. You know, a profit and loss sheet is a pretty basic thing. But there is this kind of feeling among creative people where, because we are historically shut out of the room when it comes to talking about money, that we could never understand. But anyone can learn financial literacy. What you can’t teach is how to be an operator of a warm, empathetic, caring, welcoming, highly-hospitable space. Those people are very rare. What we find is that when we put the Nodes grant up, we get some of the most incredible people around the globe, everywhere from Pakistan to Nairobi to Budapest applying to create these incredible spaces and incredible ideas. And some of them are parks, some of them are wanting to redo the public toilet in a park. These are all ideas that we put in front of our community.

We use a process called quadratic voting, so that the entire existing membership base of all of the Nodes vote on the next one. There are usually about 20 or 30 of proposals to vote on at a given time. The Index members use quadratic voting to assign votes to the spaces they believe in most. Quadratic voting works in this way where you have to decide if you’re going to give all of your votes to one space or distribute your votes across many spaces. So we get this signal from our members when they really strongly believe in a space, versus this feeling of “all of these are great, any of them would be fine.” But we don’t choose the new spaces, our members do.

**Elie: **I think scale will always be a bit of a challenge for us because cultural specificity — being community specific, and being specific to the individuals using the space on a day-to-day basis and responding to their needs and the way that they shape and inform the culture and community — it just makes it really difficult to package neatly into something that can be transferred or moved. So I think scaling through a Nodes network where people are building spaces that respond to the needs of their communities specifically, that’s one way we’re thinking about it.

Scaling in terms of stages of our lives is an interesting way of thinking about it for us. We hope that Index can be a place that can grow with you through many stages of your life, through many stages of your career. One thing that we want to work on next is a space that is focused on intergenerational relationships and community building. How can we make programming for the children in our community, the elders in the community, and support ourselves also as we go through different stages of our lives? The spaces that we’ve opened so far are very focused on early career professionals, but 10 years from now, maybe we’ll have some kids who wanna take a ceramics class after school while their parents work, or do a play, or grow a garden. How do we make these spaces so that they continue to support our needs and grow with us?

**Sam: **On the note of scale, I would say something that feels really important to the Index ethos is scaling as complement — a big way that we see if a proposal pitched in the grant process makes sense, is if we can see that folks really spent time investing in and developing an idea that feels true to the space that they’re trying to open up in. That makes it so that essentially the incentive is, instead of dropping something that’s templated, you want to drop something that complements the community that you’re trying to collaborate with and engage with earnestly. I think that an earnest approach to creating a space and building a community is something that’s really important to the Index model.

Meg Miller is editorial director at Are.na.