The Water Cooler at Pegasus Park is a newly designed and developed work environment. Through observation, our design team aimed to understand the office design, space use, and the overall experience for Water Cooler community members.

Over multiple days, we spent more than 10 hours touring individual offices of United to Learn, The Dallas Foundation, Uplift Education, and Social Venture Partners, and working from the space. We learned that within the five floors of the Water Cooler, there are three types of office styles for tenants: open co-working space, private office suites, and entire floor offices. We also learned that each organization is managing the hybrid work environment independently.

We understood that whatever we designed would need to support various organizations and their work styles.

As we built context around this context, our team focused on two types of experts: social sector real estate projects in other markets and existing Water Cooler partners who were already providing specific services to tenant organizations.

Specifically, we interviewed the Nonprofit Centers Network, a membership-based association of nonprofit centers around the United States, and Second Day, a non-profit who specializes in recruiting interns to the social sector and has an existing partnership with the Water Cooler.

Through these interviews, we worked to understand 1) best practices around establishing connections and fostering collaboration within nonprofit centers and 2) how talent development and human capital play a key role in building trust and collaboration.

The Water Cooler houses more than 25 different nonprofit organizations that operate at various scales and each have a different definition of collaboration. We wanted to understand how Executive Directors and leaders within these organizations intentionally invested organizational resources (time, people, funding) in collaborative work.

Our design team also wanted to understand a broad range of current experiences and future desires for Water Cooler community members outside of organizational leadership. To do this, we sent a community survey that asked questions related to 1) the current experience accessing amenities and services, 2) what prevents people from collaborating across organizations, and 3) what services or tools would help you collaborate in the future?

Overall, we had 41 individual responses representing 15 different organizations. 51% or participants said they currently collaborate in some capacity in their role. Generally, staff said they found it difficult to connect with other Water Cooler community members and lacked an understanding of the mission of peer organizations. Also, there was an overwhelming response that a digital community would help them connect with others.