Photo by Joye Ardyn Durham
Story by Frances Figart
Base Camp Asheville: Community and Collaboration in a Cool Space
For some entrepreneurs, working independently can cause a sense of disconnectedness. This isolation, often felt by freelance contractors and small business owners, inspired Nathan Silsbee to create Base Camp Asheville—a creative hub for tech companies, nonprofit organizations, and individuals to work in a shared environment.
“After a couple of years running my own enterprise, I felt an increasing need to collaborate, engage with others, and get out of the ‘bubble’ of my business,” he says. “I came to the conclusion that a coworking environment would be the perfect place to evolve my work and to focus on the community aspect of the workplace.”
A graduate of UNC Asheville, Nathan owns Greenstone Media, a web and mobile applications company. Evolving from Open Space Asheville in West Asheville, his coworking community now occupies an innovative facility on downtown’s happening South Slope. Their mantra: “We’re not just here to work, we’re also here to have a good time!”
You won’t find any cubicles in the three-story 1920s building recently renovated to create a number of open meeting rooms and office spaces. Printers, coffee, and high-speed Internet are offered in a streamlined setting with new hardwood floors, track lighting, and modular furniture. The second-floor main room doubles as an event space and opens onto a patio.
“One evening after a ten-hour coding grind, we rolled the ping pong table outside and played a few rounds,” Nathan recalls. “Birds were chirping and I could smell barbecue from Buxton Hall drifting up the hill. I’m supposed to be feeling anxious to leave work and get home. Instead I’m enjoying hanging out and my ‘workplace’ feels like a vacation destination.”
David and Amanda Highley run web coding company MyTownUSA from Base Camp Asheville. “It provides such a unique collaborative and communal environment, which brings a lot of synergy to our work team,” says David. “We spend most of the day working on the computer, so it’s rewarding hanging out at the end of day.”
Writer and editor Emma Stamm was seeking a workspace other than her apartment. “It gets lonely doing freelance work on your own all day,” she says. “What I found was not only an excellent coworking space but a diverse group of hardworking, skilled, and creative professionals.”
Nathan hopes to grow the Base Camp Asheville community, which currently includes LoLo, Anthroware, Asheville Tool Library, Trusted Sharing, and Endor Initiative.
“There are many unique traits to this city, my favorite being the cultural environment that the people who live here have fostered,” says Nathan. “Base Camp Asheville is creating our own unique culture of collaboration and redefining what it means to go to work.”
Base Camp Asheville is located at 56 Ravenscroft Drive. It will host the National Day of Civic Hacking June 18, an event focused on tech solutions to benefit the Homeless Coalition and City of Asheville. Learn more about events and the space at basecampavl.org.
