Providing community members in Roxbury with a shared working space was the goal of Berkshire Bank, the power behind Reevx Labs.
Reevx Labs has the functionality and appeal of just about any collaborative or flexible workspace environment you can find in Downtown Boston—but without the price tag.
The free-of-charge space, which opened in January, serves as an incubator in a community of folks who are used to commuting downtown and spend most of the day away from their neighborhood.
“Imagine if Downtown Boston had no coworking spaces at all. People down there wouldn't accept that, and they would create one and so that's kind of what we're doing here,” said ReevxLabs Director Derek Lumpkins.
For Lumpkins, a Roxbury native who runs Reevx Labs with bankers, it made sense to provide a community of talented folks with a space where they can come together, connect and share ideas around business and entrepreneurship in their own backyard. Lumpkins also uses the space to provide clients with technical assistance, seminars and workshops around financial literacy and financial education.
Greg Ball, a brand manager with Berkshire Bank, said the vision was to bring a welcoming coworking space on par with downtown offices to Roxbury specifically as part of the bank’s Storefront Project.
“When spaces are created within a community that [is] led by servers sometimes it's like, ‘Yes, let's just do the best we can,’" Ball said. "Well, we were fortunate enough to do the best we could, but with the power of Berkshire Bank, which gave us the ability to do something of high quality.”
Other than an unusual-sounding name—Re standing for Revolution, Ev for Evolution and X for Berkshire’s branding—the space’s appearance also drew customers in when it first opened.
“It’s one of the few retail buildings I can think of that doesn't have bars in the window, doesn't have a shutter that closes at the end of the day, so it's already very welcoming in that sense,” Lumpkins said.
Chrome glass and wood paneling are also some features that caught neighbors’ eyes, drawing in 20 people per day into the workspace and another 80 people at night for backroom events.
But Reevx Labs hadn't even been open for two months when the pandemic hit. The space quickly had to shut down—then pivot.
Reevx Labs adapted and provided customers with content and ways to connect on reevxlabs.com. By late July, the 1,800-square-foot space reopened with safety requirements and a limit of 10 people at a time. Pre-Covid, Lumpkins said, anyone could walk in; now, they still can.
“We have sort of structured things a little bit differently … so there is still some ability to come in and to drop in, but we do encourage people to reserve in advance,” Lumpkins said.
The debate around offices reopening at all is not of concern for Reevx Labs or for Berkshire Bank. Ball sees events like the coronavirus pandemic as more reason for people to want to use a coworking space in their community, which already keeps them closer to home and away from public transit.
“People do still want to gather and connect with other people; you just don't necessarily want to hop in your car, drive for an hour and wear a tie to work," Ball said. "But you do want to still be around folks."
Lumpkins also feels good about the longevity of Reevx Labs and future coworking spaces that Berkshire Bank plans to make in other communities. Those communities include Providence and Springfield by the end of the year and New York the following year.
And he can assure those community members that they won’t be greeted with a hard sell or generic coworking space that doesn’t have their interests in mind.
“We're not here to just like, push accounts and push CDs and push those other things,” Lumpkins said. “It really is about being that socially responsible bank and giving people the opportunity to bank in ways they haven't been able to do so before.”
