How do you tackle urban loneliness? Kindred founder Anna Anderson talks about creating a community space in Hammersmith that blends co-working, dining and events to foster real connections. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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I'm Tom Edwards.
Anna Anderson is the founder of Kindred, a community space in West London that fosters real life connections through co working dining and cultural events.
A former social worker, Anna launched the business five years ago to address the loneliness and disconnection that can come with urban life by creating a welcoming space in which people can build a sense of community.
So how do you stand out from other community spaces or members clubs?
And how do you organically build and maintain that sense of connection?
Well, here is Anna with more on how the journey began.
Kindred is a community space.
We're based in West London, we're in Hammersmith.
We're driven to address the increasingly disconnected and lonely city that we live in by creating opportunities for people to connect in real life.
So we do that through four different ways.
We have a co working offering, we have a food and drink offering, and we have our events, both our own curated program and also private events as well.
So we do that all from our beautiful building in Hammersmith.
So I trained as a social worker and I worked for three years professionally in London and I was super interested in this common theme that I saw kind of coming up.
I mean, in social work, it's a very firefighting kind of approach.
So you're dealing with crisis, crisis, crisis, and often the similar crisis.
Each time there was no approach to think about the community and kind of what was going on there on a sort of a systemic level.
And I got really interested in this concept of community.
This was sort of back in 2016, 2017, that I started thinking about what I could do.