ReSpace Projects is an award-winning organisation that empowers communities via the networked use of empty space and otherwise-wasted resources - creating mutual aid hubs that offer a low-cost, fast and sustainable armoury to help increase community resilience.

Our work at ReSpace over the last decade has developed a system that identifies, creates and then connects a network of community-led spaces that are self-sustaining and collaboratively managed. We call this ‘respacing’; it means that previously empty buildings, like missing teeth in the high-street, have a social purpose in the transitional period before they are redeveloped or formally occupied. Most sit empty for many years, but instead this resource-generating architecture provides core social facilities and plays whatever role local people need it to - whether it be food banks and communal cooking, hosting creative events and markets, housing refugees and the homeless, or supporting start-ups.

Respacing is a meanwhile-related approach, which stands out from others because:

• Spaces are brought to life through re-use, not through linear investment. These recycled and donated materials are made more readily available to the local communities by our expertly trained teams who identifying wasted resources within the local area, creating relationships with a breadth of businesses and building sites - creating an alliance of local changemakers focused on the environment, creativity, knowledge sharing, problem solving and innovation.

• This model means spaces are not immediately burdened with financial pressures, which can end up requiring other meanwhile spaces to drive income generation through exclusionary prices (e.g. expensive cafes or service provision)

• Instead, respacing allows free space to be offered to local individuals, community groups and charities - in exchange for their contribution to the space's ongoing activities (events, workshops), helping create real trust and community cohesion.