Deciding on a forever home

For the past couple of weeks, we have been thinking about where Conference2Classroom's forever home will be. While we offer connections between experts and classrooms across Canada, the idea was born in Kingston, we are being incorporated here, and we care about and feel a responsibility to our community. We were founded by a geographer after all, and place and space are very important to her! Most of our work has been done from Rachel's home office in Kingston, but as our founder is moving in May of this spring her current home office will be no longer!

​The application to incorporate as a not-for-profit requires a permanent address and the timing of this move has made things a little tricky. But this has meant making realistic plans and having realistic expectations for how we will operate this year. 

For the most part, our work is and can be done from a home office. The idea of a coworking space that we could use on say a weekly basis is also highly appealing from a cost perspective and from a collaborative perspective. But finding a suitable coworking space will take time, and we want to get our application in so that we can start applying for funding and soliciting sponsorship so that we will be well positioned to operate and grow. Of course eventually we want our program to see the success that we believe it can achieve as we reach a greater audience, but for now an office to ourselves is not something we can either realistically afford or realistically need at this time.

While it feels like we need a forever home, we realistically expect to grow over the course of the year and beyond. If we can cost save and stay comfortably in a home office, then that means more money will go directly to supporting our mission and less towards operational costs. And at this early stage in our development - which we constantly have to remind ourselves about after all the energy we have been putting in this, because we are only a few months old - this feels right. It looks like our home for now is a home office in Kingston, and soon it will be a home office in Prince Edward County. Now we just need to get one address in ink on the application, ideally so as not to need to change it in another few short months!