There’s always an excited, enthusiastic and welcoming energy when you walk into The Kollective (TK), and a lot of that can be attributed to its host, General Manager Gordy Lockhart.

He’s the front man for the co-working space and champions the incredible work they do, both for their members and the wider community through this self-sustaining social enterprise.

Between greeting attendees to running the bar to helping his team with their PowerPoints, he’s the man on the ground and shares his warmth with anyone he comes into contact with.

With both TK residents (who are largely from the not-for-profit sector) and the wider Chamber business community in attendance at our latest BA5 on Wednesday (July 7), it spoke to the theme of the evening: Collaboration, communication and connection between the corporate and social sectors.

Opening the presentation component of the evening, Chamber CEO Matt Cowley welcomed everyone to the event and gave a special thanks to Crombie Lockwood, which had team members in the room, and had recently continued their partnership with the Chamber as Community Partners.

Then Gordy took to the mic and gave an overview of the how TK works and its founding principles.

In a snapshot, there are three key goals for the organisation: Leadership (creating a space where the community thrives), management (creating an effective admin base for community groups) and better outcomes (supporting community organisations to become more capable).

Simply put, TK connects community organisations with people who can help them upskill, gives them a place with great tech and an awesome working environment that allows for collaboration and connection. This is all for the greater good of helping these groups run more efficiently and help increase the amount of funding or donations they get going back into the community (instead of spending it on operational costs).

By the numbers, they have 91 residential members (which are individuals, as Gordy believes in creating a community of individuals, not organisations). Any profits made are given back to TECT, who own TK, and redistribute those funds into community groups.

It’s very exciting what TK is doing and it’s hard not to get swept up in Gordy’s passion for the project.

We then heard from James from Good Neighbour, who shared some incredible stats about food rescue (as they had catered the evening using 100% food and utensils that had been rescued). He said they recover 12,000kg of food a week from supermarkets and 99% of what is rescued daily goes out to community groups and their people directly benefit from this.

We also heard from Liz Davies from SociaLink, which manages The Kollective, who discussed how business and social enterprises can come together to support one another, as well as two resident members: One business (James from William Buck accounting) and one social (Maxine from Families Achieving Balance).

After the formalities, the all-important business card draw took place, with Chamber Member Richard Crabb (All Things Accounting) winning a year’s membership to TK, and Gordy took the attendees on a tour of their amazing space.

Thank you to everyone who attended to learn about The Kollective. Our next BA5 will be at The Vault, with EY, Tompkins Wake and Hobson Wealth.

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