Exo Roast Co. is offering its patrons more room to enjoy their coffee, get some work done or even hold lectures or workshops at its new community event space.
The 1,200-square-foot Southern Arizona Work Space, located behind the Sixth Avenue coffee shop, features two 12-foot community tables, an 8-foot table and a variety of tools people can use to express their ideas.
“You may want to have a staff meeting or get out of your normal conference room. You can come here and use the projector, use our chalkboards, lightboards, and just kind of dig in at a different setting,” said co-founder Amy Smith.
The space, which will open in July and will serve as an extra seating area for the coffee shop, will be available for full rental outside Exo business hours and host a series of curated events.
Several are already planned for late summer and fall, including lectures by John Slattery of Desert Tortoise Botanicals, natural historian Tom Vandevender and Louise Misztal of Sky Island Alliance. There are also scheduled workshops sponsored by Food Conspiracy Co-Op and Palo, Spanish classes, book clubs and music.
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While there will be a small fee to rent the space and use equipment, the new area will not take away the coffee shop’s traditional role as a free second office, Smith said.
“I wrote my master’s thesis at Bentley’s, and I was so grateful to the staff for the two years that I basically lived there and nobody ever told me to move on or tried to push me to buy something,” she said. “We’re not trying to create a structure to make money off the working space.”
The Southern Arizona Work Space is less an expansion than a deepening of Exo’s mission, owners said, and continues its commitment to the people that gather at the coffee shop and to the community at large.
“We hope that the material and intellectual resources provided by the project will help conserve traditional practices and support innovative ones, all in an ethic of stewardship toward the cultural and natural heritage of the Arizona-Sonora region,” said Exo co-owner Doug Smith in a release.
“We intend to offer a place where the many individuals and organizations doing good work here can get the word out and share their expertise.”
