Over the past few months we've been in talks with several leaders in West Des Moines about expanding the Gravitate community and programming to their city and I'm excited to share that we're now officially up and running with a second location: Gravitate Valley Junction at 318 5th Street (yeah!).
Our building in Valley Junction has lived many previous lives and features several unique features such as large garage doors and a hose tower from its one time use as a fire station. We still have a lot of work to do there—including painting, signage and getting the new furniture installed—but we are open for business and have already had three Iowa small businesses join us as coworking community members.
One of the reasons why we focused on expanding to Valley Junction is the opportunity to work directly with the West Des Moines Business Incubator. The Incubator launched a few years ago and has had a role in building several successful businesses in West Des Moines and through out the region. The Incubator board, however, has big goals to help grow several more businesses in the community and reached out to us to be a part of it. Our team is going to manage things day-to-day and work with the board to re-envision and relaunch that overall program. Gravitate Valley Junction and the Incubator are going to locate together in the building at 318 5th St and utilize each others strengths to become an even stronger node in West Des Moines' entrepreneurial ecosystem.
Emma Walsmith from the Gravitate team is our Community Manager for the Valley Junction location and she's available to give tours, answer questions and be a resource to anyone interested in what we're building on 5th St. Send a request here.
We're open now for new monthly members, rentals and drop in coworking (by appointment) but we're going to wait until later this summer for a formal grand opening. However, you have several opportunities to check out this place during Paul Singh's Iowa Tech Tour on May 8-10. To RSVP for those events see tikly.co/gravitatedsm
PHOTO CREDIT: Historic Valley Junction on Facebook
Geoff Wood is the founder, connector and space captain at Gravitate, a workplace community for entrepreneurs, freelancers and remote workers in the heart of downtown Des Moines. In addition to writing here, he hosts a podcast, speaks at conferences, organizes events and has been helping tell the story of the Iowa startup community since 2009.