The Vale of Glamorgan Council’s Creative Rural Communities team are launching a CoWorking Month this May to celebrate and promote the use of co-working spaces in the county’s rural towns and communities.

CoWorking Month 2021 will be launched with an online platform showcasing the type of spaces that people can work from, as well as offering a small grant to assist with the purchase of furniture or equipment to get spaces ready for co-working. Potential spaces include cafes or bars, churches, hotels, community centres, or existing business sites with unused space.

The event is part of a larger project that hopes to gather and launch diverse spaces for people to work closer to home, reducing the need for residents living in rural areas to commute.

Our goal through the month is to build a new habit for people as they consider their style of working post-Coronavirus. We want to show this through as diverse a range of spaces as possible, subject to the easing of lockdown restrictions.

Co-working spaces provide small businesses, freelancers and other workers, a space to work, network and participate in the local business community. More networking opportunities, increased productivity, a boost of creativity, collaboration opportunities, cost-efficiency, and greater flexibility are just some of the benefits of co-working spaces.

Cllr. Lis Burnett, Deputy Leader and Cabinet Member for Education and Regeneration said:

“We have all experienced very different lifestyles and work-lives to anything we have known before. The future will undoubtably be shaped by our recent and ongoing experiences but now is the time to look creatively at how our future should be. Here in the Vale of Glamorgan, we are excited to work with TownSq and pioneer innovative opportunities for people to work closer to home.”

If you have a space in the Vale of Glamorgan that could be made available for people to work closer to home, then please get in contact with the team.

The initiative is being delivered in partnership with TownSq, a Welsh business corporation that creates co-working communities across the United Kingdom.

This project has received funding through the Vale of Glamorgan Council and the Wales Rural Development Programme 2014-2020 (RDP), which is funded by the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development and the Welsh Government.