Community-driven sustainable housing: World Café & Networking Session

This event will explore sustainable forms of urban living and housing, with a specific focus on shared living models including cohousing, intentional communities, regenerative villages, coliving, build to rent, purpose built student accommodation, senior living and other communal living typologies. Coliving Ventures is inviting our strategic partners to host a collective intelligence workshop to share and learn sustainable communal living best practices.

The networking event will be facilitated using a ‘World Café’ format, which is a powerful social technology for engaging people in conversations that matter, offering an effective antidote to the fast-paced fragmentation and lack of connection in today’s world. The World Café method includes five phases including 1) Setting, 2) Welcome & Introduction, 3) Small-Group Rounds, 4) Questions and 5) Harvest. This method allows for the gathering and exchange of the collective intelligence of the group, so that a majority of voices are heard and an abundance of insights can be shared.

We will structure the networking session in a way that we can share our internal R&D as well as facilitate smaller thematic group discussions where specialists can dive deeper into categories such as sustainability, impact, ESG, social value, architecture, technology, community, branding, marketing and more. Each sub-group will have a ‘harvester’, a lead for each category that will take notes about the group discussion and then later share with the wider group at the end of the sharing rounds.

We will then alternate participants into other tables / categories in order to ‘cross-pollinate’ ideas and insights. At the end of the session each of the dedicated table note takers will share the insights from their category with the wider group in order for everyone to hear the different insights gathered. This methodology not only allows attendees to meet fellow thought leaders and specialists, but it also allows them to dive deeper into important sustainable urbanism topics. The World Café method blends the best of a meet and greet with an interactive workshop format and allows for networking, idea sharing and data gathering.

A follow up publication will be released by our Coliving Insights venture, a digital publication with a hyper-niche audience of shared living developers, investors, serviced providers, operators and other professionals / businesses. The publication will include the insights gathered during the networking session as well as insights gathered through post-event conversations and communications.