Chris Gourlay : Spacehive Ltd
What is Spacehive all about?
Spacehive is an online funding platform for neighbourhood improvement projects, which makes it as easy for communities to buy a new park or playground as buying a track on iTunes. The aim is to put communities in the driving seat of neighbourhood planning. Spacehive achieves this by providing a tool that gives communities collective financial clout to deliver popular projects independently of councils.
What is the social impact?
- Boost civic participation in planning and sense of ownership of public space
- Offset spending cuts (which are set to halve spending on public space projects from 2011) by tapping private sector investment.
- Make planning system accessible and transparent
Who are the people involved?
Chris is a former Sunday Times journalist and Board Adviser to the charity Global Angels. During his four years at the paper covering architecture and planning, he led a successful campaign to stop Heathrow's Third Runway, and broke stories including Prince Charles' intervention over the controversial Chelsea Barracks project. He was also chief reporter for London. Frustrated by the dearth of investment and creativity in our public spaces, he left the paper to start Spacehive. Chris is an UnLtd Awardee and part of the Nexters initiative - a group of social entrepreneurs supported by leading companies such as Deloitte.
Chair: Rod Schwartz. As CEO of ClearlySo, Rod has unrivalled experience of the social business sector and has helped dozens of start-ups to flourish. He formerly had a top-ranked career in financial services, including as Head of Equities at Lehman. He has chaired numerous social businesses including Just Giving.
Operations: Ankur Srivastava. Ankur has led web development projects for several successful startups.
Project Coordinators: A team of four Coordinators assist communities in developing their projects.
What are the future plans?
The scale of impending cuts presents a unique opportunity for Spacehive to scale rapidly so that it is in a position to help communities revive popular local projects - and initiate brand new ones. To achieve this we will rapidly expand our team of project coordinators, invest in on-going improvements to the website and marketing.
www.spacehive.com based in London.