Description of organisation

CoLab House is a social cooperative enterprise with the purpose of exploring sustainable and innovative ways to provide spaces, knowledge and support to artists, social actors and social initiatives in order to magnify their potential.

Greece since the beginning of the economic crisis has seen a rising number of initiatives and individual social actors forming groups relating to sustainability, non-formal education and social aspects in close networking with their European counterparts.

Being part of this movement an informal group of travellers met during the “Voyages to Heterotopies”, a cross-disciplinary learning journey through southern Europe’s sustainable projects. During this experience we witnessed ways to collaborate and develop together, as we visited communities and co-working spaces as well as discovering our lack of physical spaces for hosting artists, activists, seminars and relevant workshops in our local reality, especially in Athens.

We specifically identified that:

- Environmental challenges, scarcity of resources and lack of infrastructure is threatening the wellbeing and sustainability in the urban context.

- Young creatives, youth workers and social actors are in need of improving the efficiency and impact of their actions, through opportunities to network, display, improve their daily activities.

- In the context of 5 million inhabitants, in Athens, few spaces can offer networking, co-working and hosting facilities, both in solidarity and at reasonable prices.

To respond we formed CoLab House, to explore new models in answering these challenges by

- Commonly managing our resources in order to respond to our needs, based on fair work, honest communication and solidarity.
- Creating collaborative spaces modeled on circular economy, developing a feedback loop between sustainability, arts and culture and multicultural inclusion.
- Developing a pilot space of 400 sq meters in the north suburbs of Athens that can be an example of sustainable management in the urban context.

Besides the physical dimension CoLab House is building on the established experience and networks of its members in order to become a mobility center for learning activities, hosting and supporting volunteers, focused on raising awareness about sustainability issues while using non-formal education methods as an effective pathway for self-development and inclusion.

Inclusion topics

This organisation is willing to involve volunteers who face situations which make their participation in activities more difficult, from the following categories for different types of project:

• Economic obstacles
• Geographical obstacles
• Refugees