On a kind of transformation you can’t measure in square meters.
A month after our move, there are still a few boxes left. The last ones.
They’re slower to unpack than the first. Maybe because they’re less urgent. Or maybe because they carry more than just things.
Something has shifted with this move. Not just the address.
As a cooperative for the self-employed, we operate in a landscape where growth is usually defined in very concrete terms: more space, more infrastructure, more overhead, more pressure. For many freelancers that often translates into the opposite of what growth promises: less stability, less predictability, less time.
We know this logic. We’ve worked inside it.
Rethinking growth
Over the past years, we’ve built structures for sustainable self-employment, approaches to social protection for the freelancers, and tools that simplify administration without making people invisible. With our Smart Portal, we’ve digitalized processes that support financial security for freelancers and self-employed workers, while leaving room for very different ways of working. With the WorkCoopHub, we created a space where solidarity in freelancing becomes a practice rather than a slogan.
For this work, we received the Berlin Award for Social Enterprises in the category of transformation. We’re proud of that. But the more important question is: what exactly is being transformed?
We would say: our measure of growth.
Because we have grown. As an organization, as a network for freelancers, as a solidarity-based cooperative.
And that is precisely why we decided to become smaller.
It sounds contradictory. It only is if growth is still measured in square meters.
What happens if it isn’t?
If what matters is no longer how much space we own, but how we use it?
If size is not defined by offices, but by the strength of the relationships that emerge within them?
If a solidarity economy cooperative is not designed to expand endlessly, but to remain connective and resilient?
Our move into a shared office at Franz-Mehring-Platz 1 is exactly such a shift.
Less space, stronger connections
We gave up space.
And gained possibilities.
We reduced fixed costs.
And expanded our room to act.
We moved closer together.
And at the same time became more open to cooperation, exchange, and the kind of solidarity economy in the world of work that only exists when it is practiced.
This is not a symbolic gesture. It’s a practical decision.
At a time when many freelancers are navigating unstable contracts, taxes, questions of financial and social protection or bogus self-employment, the question is not how to grow at any cost. The question is how to build structures that hold.
A platform cooperative, a freelancer community, a cooperative that offers real advantages for its members can only work if it starts there: with relationships that remain reliable, even when markets are not.
Maybe this past month can be summed up like this:
We have become smaller in space.
We have grown in impact.
And we have remained, in a quiet way, the same.
Bigger – smaller – the same.
Where this continues: together
What emerges from this is not a finished model. It’s a moment in a longer process, one that only makes sense when it is shared.
That’s why we’re opening our new space at Franz-Mehring-Platz 1 on June 16 for our summer gathering and General Assembly.
Not as a presentation of final answers, but as an invitation:
to members of the Smart cooperative, to self-employed people, to anyone looking for new ways of combining financial security with autonomy.
Come by.
See how we work now.
Bring your questions, your experiences, your contradictions.
Because in the end, a cooperative doesn’t grow through space.
It grows through the ways people choose to use it together.
We’d love to see you there.