Hub Coworking Hawaii

Hawaii's Best Coworking Space

Member News

#HumansoftheHub Intro & Patrick Gartside

Welcome to the #HumansOfTheHub campaign. This social media post/blog campaign is one of our efforts to bring us together in a time where we can’t all meet up in the Community kitchen for a member luncheon, or wave “hi” to each other in the office space. Our goal is to bring more of a human connection to the virtual world we have found ourselves in. 

It has been brought up in one of our zoom meetings that there has been such a surge in email, text, social, slack, and call notifications that at one point it all just seems to be chatter. And while it’s great that we all have the time to talk, we have yet to truly connect. We are sharing posts, documents, and news, but we are not sharing stories, experiences, and feelings. In launching the #HumansOfTheHub campaign, the Hub invites you to take a second and meet some of your community members so that hopefully, when we come out of all this, we can look upon familiar faces, say thank you to them for the work they’ve done, collaborate with them on an impactful project, or at least create new friendships.  

 

For the first human profile, the Hub team nominated Patrick Gartside to kickstart #HumansOfTheHub. Patrick has worked with the Hub since October of 2018 and he and his Work Now Hawaii team clean the spaces that we all use regularly. Work Now Hawaii is a nonprofit organization that was established to help people living with disabilities achieve independence through employment opportunities. His work is especially important as we live through COVID-19. The Hub remains open to our 24/7 membership holders, and on any given day there are a handful of people in the space to carry out their essential business. Regardless of the number of patrons, a community space like the Hub should be thoroughly cleaned and maintained; if not just for general upkeep, but for the day that we are all allowed to come in and occupy space once again. Patrick and the Work Now Hawaii teams are in the Hub twice a day, cleaning the facility to keep up with the health precautions given out by the Department of Health. WNH offers training programs that are designed to maximize individual’s strengths and abilities in a way that increases their confidence and productivity. Patrick emphasized that WNH makes it a point to match an individual’s interests and abilities with their occupation. The goal is to identify and create accommodations for employable, hardworking individuals with disabilities to be successful throughout their careers.

Get to know Patrick! 

Patrick Gartside- Founding Executive Director of Work Now Hawaii

Interview Questions: 

  1. What work do you do?

I have recently founded a nonprofit whose mission is to help people living with disabilities find success through employment.  Work Now Hawaii provides job opportunities, job training, and job placement to helping people to set and reach their employment goals.  We work to help individuals find opportunities that match their interests and abilities.

       2. What’s your WHY?

As someone who has struggled with employment in direct relation to mental health, I am committed to providing a pathway for others to overcome barriers and to reach their potential.

       3. What do people not know about you?

I eagerly started working at the age of 14, and have since held eight jobs (store clerk, dishwasher, restaurant front and back of house, pizza shop manager, food delivery person, web developer, and digital marketing consultant.) I have also started several small businesses. Everybody takes a different path in life, what matters is that we keep pushing forward and following our interests, developing our skills and contributing to our communities.

 

Take a Peek at the Details from our Wefunder Campaign

As we wrote about a few weeks ago, we closed out our Wefunder campaign – thank you SO MUCH to those that participated and committed fund to help us grow. We are so excited to build out the newest location in Hawaii Kai, and will be sharing updates soon.

And we wanted to share some final numbers and stats with the community. Take a peek at our infographic for some highlights!

 

Hawaii Kai Sneak Peek: Check out our New Location!

On July 11, Members, friends, and the Impact Hub Honolulu’s team came together at Liko’s Tap & Tavern at the Hawaii Kai Shopping Center, and over beers and vegan tacos we got to see the first glimpses of the newest Impact Hub location in Hawaii Kai.

The Impact Hub Hawaii Kai location, projected to open in March 2020, is approximately 7,200 square feet, with collaborative marina-view coworking, meeting rooms of various sizes, communal kitchen, and several private office spaces on the second floor, overlooking the water.

As the new location is very much under construction at this time, visitors were reminded by our Co-Founder George Yarbrough to wear our ‘imagination goggles’ to see the bright future of our newest location. Of the new location, Co-Founder Anne Weber says, “Our vision is an interconnected Hawaii where one membership gives each member access to 11 locations across the islands and 100 existing Impact Hubs worldwide.”

We are raising the funds to build out this location with our current Wefunder investment campaign; we’ve currently raised about $150,000 to be used for this new location. If you are interested in investing, click here to get started!

Thanks to those who came out to share in this momentous occasion. Check out all the pictures from our event here in our gallery:

A Message from our Cofounder, Nam Vu, about our Wefunder Campaign

Those who know me closely know that I have a deep seated desire to help people that came out of my search for the meaning in life during my contemplative days in high school. I’ve always looked for ways to leave this world better than I found it and have been involved in various service activities. After a while, adulthood set in and service took a back seat to creating a comfortable life with the goal of one day having enough comfort to be able to dedicate service as a full time endeavor.

Then came Impact Hub Honolulu. Being a part of Impact Hub Honolulu has provided me with the opportunity to be of service and at the same time build a sustainable and thriving business. It is that dream that I think many of us have but didn’t think could be possible. At Impact Hub we can do well while doing good. It is possible.

We want to spread this message far and wide and help everyone do well while doing good. We recognize that it is much more difficult to think about and act on your intentions to do good in the world when you are struggling with rent and bills. Our approach is to help everyone to do well so that we can all do good and change the world.

By providing a place where our members can focus on their work and leaving the facilities needs to us, by providing mentorship and learning opportunities to grow their practice, by providing opportunities to join us in doing good, we hope to enable our members to make their own social impact; to democratize the work of social impact and put in in the hands of everyone to do their small share.

To help us spread this message, our plan is to build a network of 11 Impact Hubs across Hawaii to create a network of social entrepreneurs in Hawaii who join the over 15,000 social entrepreneurs that are already in the Impact Hub network, the largest network of social entrepreneurs in the world.

Today we publicly launch our Wefunder campaign to raise funds for our expansion plans. This is an investment NOT a donation. You will receive your money back through a revenue share plus a return. There is an early bird special for the first $125,000 invested.

We chose Wefunder because it aligns with our community building focus and enables our community to invest in our success was well as benefit from our success.

Please take a look and share widely. Together we can make change.

 

Announcing our 2019 Impact Partners

Impact Hub HNL is fortunate to partner with select local businesses to help make a bigger impact in our community.

Impact Hubs worldwide are united in the commitment to make social impact in the community, and locally we are grateful for the support of our 2019 Impact Partners.

These companies have demonstrated their support for the growing entrepreneurial and small business community in Honolulu. All Impact Partners are dedicated to bettering Hawaii through their thoughtful business actions.

Our Impact Partner Circle serves as a valuable advisory council that provides sponsorship of events and memberships, strategic insights, and thought leadership for the Impact Hub HNL community. We are proud to announce continued partnership with the following organizations: :

airbnb

Airbnb is a homeshare and experience app that helps create a world of global citizens. With 4,500,000 listings in over 65,000 cities in 191 countries, Airbnb offers the widest variety of unique spaces for rent, whether you want a room, a house, a boat, a tent, or a castle (along with offering other awesome experiences.)

airbnb’s work supports the following SDGs:

American Savings Bank

American Savings Bank is one of the primary financial institutions in the state of Hawaii, and have been serving Hawaii’s businesses and communities since 1925. ASB provides a full range of financial products and services, including business and consumer banking, home loans, insurance and investments.

We’ve partnered with ASB for many events at Impact Hub HNL that help grow financial literacy in the community, including the free public event entitled Building Community with Women Entrepreneurs that aims to build communication and connection between female entrepreneurs and freelancers in our community.

ASB’s work supports the following SDGs:

Elemental Excelerator

One of the leading cleantech incubators in the world, Elemental Excelerator is committed to deploying solutions that make direct impacts on our energy and water usage across the state and throughout the Asia-Pacific region. They work in partnership with the Emerson Collective’s Elemental platform, which is focused on balancing the needs of humanity and nature by supporting scalable, equitable, and innovative solutions.

Elemental Excelerator’s work supports the following SDGs:

Hawaii Investment Ready

Hawaii Investment Ready (HIR) is an accelerator program designed to help Hawaii businesses thrive. Their statewide peer-to-peer learning program has been created to support the sustainability of island social enterprises so that they can scale their businesses in Hawaii and beyond.

HIR’s work supports the following SDGs:

simplicityHR by Altres

ALTRES Staffing is Hawaii’s largest staffing and recruiting company, with seven offices across the state, and simplicityHR by ALTRES serves as the human resources “back office” for more than 2,200 local businesses. For nearly 50 years, they have been Hawaii’s #1 HR outsourcing company and is ranked as one of Hawaii’s Best Places to Work.

Altres’ work supports the following SDGs:

Ulupono

Ulupono Initiative is a local non-profit that invests in a more sustainable Hawaii. Founded by eBay founder Pierre Omidiyar. Ulupono seeks to invest in and help grow local organizations involved in clean/renewable energy, diversified agriculture, and waste-to-energy management – choosing to invest in projects that have high potential for creating large-scale social impact. They invest in companies focused on improving the local energy, food, water, and waste sectors.

Ulupono’s work supports the following SDGs:

Technology Update from our Co-Founder & Chief Geeky Officer

Nam VuAloha Everyone! Chúc mừng năm mới! (Happy New Year!)

It’s been a while since I have sent a message out and a lot has happened… Wait, that’s what I said last time! We have some great news about our technology and our facilities and we wanted to be sure to share some details with you.

New Copiers are Coming

We’ve ordered three new copiers that will be delivered by the end of February. The current printers have (mostly) served us well, but as anyone with a Chromebook knows, it’s not perfect. The new printers will support printing from all current platforms and provide more reliable performance for all of us. These new printers will also add security and privacy of documents – you will need to enter a personal code to release the documents in the print queue. Additionally, the printers will be on a service contract which will ensure uptime in case our resident copier repair tech (ahem, that’s me) is out. And YES, these new printers will have scanning capabilities. Copies, printing, and scanning will remain free for members.

New Door Locks

We will be installing a new door lock system. August (the current app-based lock system) has been really good to us and was a great starting option. However, the time has come for a more robust system. The new system will feature an access pad – to gain entry, you just need to hold your smartphone up to the access pad and do a little twist of your wrist. The new locks will not have a delay, so when the door closes after hours, it will immediately be locked. This will increase the security of our members and our shared space. As usual, this is only applicable to Unlimited Members who have access 24/7.

New Member Dashboard

In the coming months, we will be rolling out a new member management system to replace our current system. The new system will have a web-based and mobile platform so you can choose whichever option is more convenient. Like any new program, there will be an adjustment period to learn the new system, but we are optimistic that it will be significantly better overall. The primary driver of this change was for improved backend management: as we have grown, the current system became increasingly difficult to manage. Finally, apologies in advance – everyone will need to re-enter your credit card information when the new system goes live due to credit card privacy rules.

New Thermostats

You may have noticed that we’ve been changing out all of the thermostats for improved energy savings and comfort. The old thermostats could not be programmed efficiently or easily, which meant that the inside blower units were running every Sunday even though the building chiller was not providing us with cold air. The new thermostats give us complete flexibility in scheduling and gives us control of all of the thermostats from afar – all 14 of them. We will be changing the thermostats in Suite 200 very soon. Thank you for your patience – we know, it is COLD!

VoIP Phones

You may have noticed the addition of phones in the Small Meeting Room and the Boardroom. These are voice-over-IP (VoIP) phones and are for you to use like a regular phone – there is no need to dial any codes to get an outside line. Do you want us to install phones in the red London phone booths? Let us know.

Internet Connection and Wi-Fi

We’ve upgraded our connection to a full 1Gbps/1Gbps (that’s gigabytes per second, and yes, that’s REALLY fast)! Previously we had a 100Mbps burstable to 1Gbps – this means that it normally operated at 100Mbps, but if there is a need to go higher because of usage or demand, then it would burst up higher. This was super confusing because when you ran a speedtest, it would not show 1Gbps causing some of you to ask me, “What’s Uuuuppp?” I’ve recently transitioned to cloud storage for my personal files and photos and have been uploading 3TB of data to the cloud, which would have taken me 733 hours to do at home, which is about one month! Instead, it took me a total of about 24 hours to upload everything at Impact Hub HNL! For the fastest speeds, you can use the wired connection downstairs and in offices.

We also have a 300Mbps backup connection that automatically kicks in if our main connection goes down for any reason. We were careful to make sure that the two connections do not share facilities upstream to provide redundancy. Which means if there is a power outage at one of the facilities it should not affect both connections. Super geeky, I know.

We recently needed to move the main connection to a new server rack which required us to take the main connection offline. The backup kicked in as designed and no one even knew anything was being done.

The Wi-Fi access points we use are stadium grade/carrier grade. Translation: it’s the same equipment many stadiums use for Wi-Fi to provide service to a lot of devices in a confined area. It will easily provide access to 500 devices concurrently in our space.

All of this for you, our valued members! As always, if you have any questions, or comments, please do not hesitate to reach out to me directly.

Nam, Co-Founder and Chief Geeky Officer