Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/591861
But what Babchuk refers to here isn't just physical, it's the grav- ity of ideas housed under this one roof. ere's a clear industrial heritage to the room, in turn encouraging industriousness from the patrons of the café, who are encouraged to use the area as a working space, and the students formally enrolled in Groundswell's educa- tional programs. e result is an atmosphere one imagines is akin to the salons of Europe during the Enlightenment. Groundswell bustles with cerebral musings all week long, but two days a week the café is closed to regular business and the space instead becomes one giant classroom. Lectures, panels, boot camps, mentoring and exchanges of creative visions serve to guide participants into personal trajectories of meaningful self- employment in what the organization calls "social-impact ventures." O ne of the recent projects to emerge from this space is called Wood Shop, a custom-furniture-manufacturing business that builds exclusively from reclaimed wood diverted from land- fills. Wood Shop is unique among other businesses doing the same in that it also uses pallets – a major source of waste wood not often considered salvageable. It's a process known as "upcycling" – repurposing material for a higher calling than its original use. e business is the brainchild of Chris Nichols, a 32-year-old Groundswell graduate who, incidentally, built the bar at the café as his first project. ough Nichols has a master's in sociology, he first worked in carpentry to pay for school. At the outset of starting his PhD, he had second thoughts. "I was getting increasingly dissatisfied with theorization and different critiques of the world without feeling empowered to actually effect change," he remembers. "I realized working with my hands was what I really wanted to do. en coming across Groundswell was a perfect scenario where I'd get to take some of these critiques and put them into practice." Nichols finished the program just a year ago, and yet he and his two partners, Ben Huff and Andrew Hewins, are already so busy they recently opened a new space in the False Creek Flats industrial area to keep up with demand, and hired an employee. If all goes well, that employee will eventually become a partner, as Wood Shop is in fact a worker-owned co-op. "We're pretty committed, and have it written into our bylaws," says Nichols, "to work on consensus and to not organize ourselves hierarchically. Which maybe doesn't make such a big difference when you're only three people, but it certainly mandates how we would grow and incorporate new members. As soon as there's a fourth member, that person will have a 25 per cent say." As it turns out, this is something that actually works well in the marketplace. Nichols has found a good niche among "people with whom the ethics of being a co-op or being environmentally conscious resonate." Part of this, he says, is due to a growing progressive consciousness in Vancouver, as shown by the city's mandate to be the greenest city in the world by 2020. F a l l 2 0 1 5 I V a n c o u v e r F o u n d a t i o n l p a g e 2 5 (far left) Former student and current instructor Chris Nichols joins co-founder Gilad Babchuk at the reclaimed-wood bar Nichols built for the Groundswell Café; (this page) Nichols is the architect behind Wood Shop, a custom-furniture co-op born from his participation in the Groundswell program.