CodeLaunch Community Partner Spotlight: COhatch Creates New Ways to Work While Supporting Startups Around the Country
Our CodeLaunch Ohio 2022 community partner COhatch is a coworking, meeting, and event space provider, but they also put an immense amount of effort into giving back to their communities.
COhatch currently has locations across Ohio and Indianapolis, with many more spaces popping up over the next year. While their growth is something to be celebrated, COhatch Head of Impact Jessica Gesue told us they’re most excited about helping people through their Impact Collective Program.
Boost Scholarship
The Impact Collective Program provides three different kinds of scholarships in the communities COhatch serves. The Boost Scholarship focuses on local start-ups with an emphasis on minority and women entrepreneurs.
The people who receive the scholarships get to use the COhatch spaces absolutely free of charge as they work to build their startup and bring their ideas to life.
“Throughout our years, we’ve seen just how important local businesses and ideas matter. We’ve always known that supporting local businesses is imperative to our community, but as we created a community of local entrepreneurs, we’ve seen the impact supporting local startups and businesses makes near and far.” – COhatch
71 startup founders have gotten a Boost Scholarship, and COhatch has awarded $209,300 to local startups thus far. They also provide members and other community members a chance to “adopt a startup”. This means they will pair a startup with a mentor or supporter that can help their company grow and succeed.
CodeLaunch Partnership
COhatch will give the winner of CodeLaunch Ohio 2022 their own Boost Scholarship! This generous award will help them work on their startup while also getting numerous chances to network throughout the building.
We asked Jessica why COhatch wanted to partner with CodeLaunch. She said it was a no-brainer for their company, especially since they are seeing a major increase in startups popping up throughout Ohio.
“We love the idea of partnering with experts and want to help connect people,” Jessica said. “This includes connecting our Boost Scholars with CodeLaunch.”
We’ve decided that the CodeLaunch Ohio 2022 semi-finalists and finalists’ announcements will be made from the COhatch Gateway location in Columbus! This space is only minutes from where the final competition will be held and we are thrilled to provide this great news to startups from such a fun space.
COhatch also hosted our Ohio Tour at the beginning of May, which gave our Founder Jason W. Taylor the opportunity to meet startup founders throughout Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati while everyone enjoyed happy hour at the workspaces.
Jessica said COhatch likes that people do not have to pay in order to compete in CodeLaunch and that we do not take any equity. This made us perfect partners for their mission to help Ohio startups thrive.
More About COhatch
COhatch is a coworking, meeting, and event space all in one! “Work. Meet. Live.” is the phrase they center everything around and believe the “live” component is their differentiating power. COhatch locations have game rooms, birthday party spaces, theater rooms, sports simulators, and more.
“We want to treat everyone like a family and have shared resources,” Jessica said.
The other two scholarships COhatch regularly gives are for non-profits and community members. So far, they have given $1M worth of scholarships to non-profits since July 2021.
They also recently launched COhatch+ on May 17th! This digital platform helps members make connections with people in the COhatch community, even if they do not need a physical place to work. They have digital portals for neighborhood groups and nonprofit needs. Jessica said COhatch+ will have a startups and investors group in the future too.
To learn more about COhatch, click here. You can find out more about their Boost Scholarship by using this link.
