Dot Dot Dot is on the move

Lizzie painting our new office

This week is office-moving week for us at Dot Dot Dot.  After a very happy two and a half years of being based at the Young Foundation in Bethnal Green, we’re packing up our boxes and moving to a new space at Toynbee Hall.

Working at the Young Foundation has been fantastic – while being there, we’ve grown from a two-man-band taking up a small corner in a shared office to a team of eight overflowing from our expanded space.  Having affordable, flexible office space within an inspirational organisation like the Young Foundation, which does fantastic policy and practical work on important social issues, has made a big difference for Dot Dot Dot.  It has also been great to be surrounded by other organisations doing great work to improve people’s lives, including Spice, the Reader Organisation and Grandparents Plus.

Toynbee Hall – our new home

But we’re very excited about our new home, especially because it’s a chance to work alongside Toynbee Hall, a fantastic charity which was a central inspiration in the process of setting up Dot Dot Dot.  Toynbee Hall was established in 1884 as part of the Settlement Movement during the Victorian era, which saw Oxbridge colleges setting up outposts in deprived areas, where students could live while voluntarily helping people suffering from poverty.  Over the past century, Toynbee Hall has evolved, but has kept its strong focus on helping the most deprived.  Today it offers a range of crucial services for Tower Hamlets, many of which are supported by volunteers.  And as well as building the community and campaigning for an end to poverty, it continues to run a residential volunteering scheme, providing people who give time to charitable causes with inexpensive accommodation within Toynbee Hall – this programme informed Dot Dot Dot’s own mission to use empty buildings to enable volunteering and contribute to the community.

Remi painting our new space

It’s also an exciting move for Dot Dot Dot because it’s a chance for us to fit out our own office space in a way which reflects our commitment to recycling, making the most of resources that would otherwise be wasted, and travelling light. Our space is currently a blank canvas – we’ve painted the walls a clean white, and although we will be moving in with enough desks, chairs and filing cabinets to function, we’ll be aiming to kit ourselves out with as much upcycled and reappropriated furniture as we can over the next few months.  We’re talking to the Remakery, a centre in Brixton which aims to support the reuse of building waste, and to a couple of designers who specialise in building great furniture out of materials that would otherwise be put in skips.  But if you have any suggestions of who else we might approach to help us to make our office comfortable and stylish with minimal use of new resources, please do let us know!