Dear Friends,
From April 2020, 55 East will transition from a community space to a more dedicated space for enterprise and business support. Hatch will run a variety of Southwark-focused enterprise programmes, which you can find here.
Over the last few years, since opening our doors in November 2017, we have delivered over 1500 events to over 5000 people, from women’s boxing, indoor markets all the way to food pop-ups, art exhibitions and many independent music events. We loved every minute of delivering, organising, hosting and co-hosting these events.
Hatch has also led on a 6-months’ research project in and around East Street and Walworth from September 2019 – January 2020 to understand how regeneration and gentrification are affecting the local area. This research has pointed to a huge demand for structural investments into Walworth from the local government, funders and large businesses to instigate transformative change in the area. However, many of the needs we have identified to improve the area and to make it better for local residents, businesses and the community are not new. In fact, they have been highlighted in reports for the last decade, without any concerted efforts to address them in a strategic and consistent manner. These reports are available from Southwark Council and the latest report “Walworth 2030”, will soon be available too.
Hatch is still a relatively young charity with a core mission to support more people from diverse backgrounds into business. We have delivered enterprise support to over 2000 people since 2014 and are now focusing on even more support, especially to Southwark residents and businesses. We believe that we can have a bigger impact by focusing on fewer, more mission-aligned things and hence our decision to focus on enterprise support exclusively from April 2020.
The Hatch offices will still be located on East Street. We plan to continue delivering our training programmes in our events space and intend to continue our regular pop-ups in the Kitchen, such as Big Mamma’s Kitchen (Saturday/ Sunday) and also regular Food Pop-ups.
We want to thank everyone who has supported 55 East, whether through attending our events or as an organiser yourself. We will have some special events in store over the year, for which its best to sign-up to our newsletter.
Best Regards,
Dirk Bischof
(CEO)
