If you’ve ever wanted to explain what Indy Hall is, you’ve probably discovered it’s surprisingly hard. You can describe the space. You can list the events. You can tell stories about the people you’ve met here.

But underneath all of that is something much simpler: the way we treat each other.

So with our 20th Anniversary approaching, once we decided to center it on our ethos statement “Take care of yourself, Take Care of Each Other, Take Care of This Place”, the idea of putting that statement on physical items became obvious!

And thanks to our talented friends @the666cat and Jason Santa Maria, we have a set of brand new designs to show you — and they’re available for pre-order now.

But only 100 preorders of each design are available!

Kindness is Punk Rock

The iconic @the666cat brought unmistakable Philadelphia energy, combining a punk rock vibe with yellow roses, symbolizing friendship & joy.

Check it out below, available in color on a super-comfy ivory shirt, and a monochrome variant on a graphite tee.

Make Caring your every day carry

The other thing people have been suggesting for a while is an Indy Hall tote bag. Everybody loves a good tote!

Longtime friend and member Jason Santa Maria pitched in to help us interpret the classic bodega bag design to our theme as well, giving us a tote design that we’re super proud of.

Supports Artists & Local Businesses…and our party!

Each of these items invites you to help us spread the ideas that we try to live by, which to us is much more meaningful than sporting a logo.

Plus, proceeds from every preorder goes directly to the local makers, Indy Hall members, friends, and small businesses helping make our September 26 celebration happen.

Don’t think of this as a fundraiser…think of it as a reinvestment in the people who make this place worth celebrating.

Items are available individually, or as a shirt + tote bundle with 10% off.

Note: Pickup orders available now. Shipping options (domestic and int’l) available later this week.

Preorder yours at indyhall.org/merch →

Again, only 100 preorders available of each design, so if one speaks to you, don’t wait!

Thanks for helping us celebrate not just what we’ve built together — but the way we’ve built it.

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When I came back from vacation last week, Adam shared the visual concepts that he’d been working on for the 20th Anniversary.

One of the emergent themes that stuck is “collages” - in part inspired by our friends at Collage Philadelphia including their chief ambassador in our community, Craig H.

Like a collage, every great experience at Indy Hall is a sort of composite of contributions from a range of people. Even if it seems a little chaotic or random, it takes careful thought and intention to stitch them together into something that couldn’t have existed without bringing those disparate pieces together.

I love this visual metaphor! It feels very resonant for how we think about our own community and the communities we collaborate with.

It also helped me realize what was missing from the new 20th anniversary website. Photos!

Share your photos, so we can stitch them together

We’ve started sifting through a pool of our own photos from across old Flickr albums, Dropbox folders, iPhoto libraries, and the archived corners of the Indy Hall website.

But beyond a few notable exceptions, it’s mostly my photos. A singular perspective. Definitely not the diversity of style and perspective that makes a collage feel rich and meaningful.

So we have two requests from you, our community of members and alumni, supporters & friends!

1 - If you have photos from Indy Hall or Indy Hall adjacent memories, please share them!

If possible, share a sentence or two about the memories attached to the photo or collection.

2 - If there’s something that makes you think of Indy Hall, snap a new photo of yourself with that object or in that place.

Maybe it’s your classic Indy Hall hoodie or our limited edition lego minifigs. Maybe it’s a place that you want to go with a person who’s special to you.

Whatever it is, we can’t wait to see and hear those memories.

For now we’re keeping submissions simple.

Send me a note and attach your photos/memories. If it’s more than a few photos, use your fav file sharing tool like Google Drive or Dropbox.

And let us know if you’d like the photos credited to you, or if you prefer to contribute anonymously!

Our hope is to sprinkle the website with memories as we get closer to the celebrations in September, and beyond.

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Years ago, I heard my friend Chris Lehmann from Science Leadership Academy share a sort of mantra they encourage their students to live by:

Take care of yourself, Take care of each other, Take care of this place we share

It felt so aligned to Indy Hall that, with permission, we adopted it as our own.

At one point, we even had it hand-lettered by member Mike Jackson, and had it on member key cards and a rug near our entrance!

This ethos is always in the background, guiding our ideas, our decisions, and our priorities.

Even when the words aren’t visible, we’re doing our best to live by them.

So we thought, what if we made 20th anniversary a way to make this ethos visible?

And over the last few weeks, the Indy Hall team and a collection of very helpful members have put together a month long series of celebrations that span our history, our city, and our community.

Plus a 4th theme to extend the ethos beyond the celebration. 👀

And we couldn’t be more excited!

📆 Five September Dates to Save

The BIG event to put on your calendar is Saturday, Sept 26th, right here at the Clubhouse.

If you’ve ever been a part of the Indy Hall community, as a member or a friend or champion or cheerleader, it would mean the WORLD to have you in the room.

We know that members (and the community!) have a truly global footprint, so if travel to Philadelphia is in the cards we’d love to see you.

For every Friday in September leading up to the big shindig, we’ve put together a series of smaller gatherings to give us a way to revisit chapters of our history through the Indy Hall ethos itself.

I’ll be sharing more details over the coming weeks, but for now, save these dates:

• Friday September 4 — Take Care of Yourself
• Friday September 11 — Take Care of Each Other
• Friday September 18 — Take Care of This Place
• Friday September 25 — Take Care of the Future

Then it all comes together on September 26th for the party!

Come for one, come for all.

Can’t make it but want to show some love and be a part of the celebration?

We’ve got you covered too — more on that soon!

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I’ve been a Podia customer for nearly a decade, so I was beyond stoked when they asked about hosting a coworking meetup in Philadelphia and doing it with us!

If you’re unfamiliar, Podia is a platform for digital creators and course builders that’s noticed the same thing many of us have: the internet has gotten less human, despite the ability and promise to connect us across physical locations.

As they’ve shifted their online product and course product to embrace human connections rather than trying to replace them with AI, they decided to start hosting in-person coworking events for anyone who creates products online and wants to connect with other creators and digital business owners.

The format is very similar to our PWYW coworking days, just specifically designed for Philly-based Podia creators and entrepreneurs to meet each other and work alongside Indy Hall members.

The afternoon may include a casual show & tell — 5-minute lightning rounds for anyone who wants to share what they’re building.

And yes, it wraps up with our Friday Happy Hour tradition!

If you’re building something with Podia — or just curious about the stuff other people are making — grab an RSVP.

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Over the last 6 months, we’ve been applying the same idea of “laying the groundwork for collaboration” at the community level, in addition to individual people.

Between our own events, member-run activities, and our community partners, we have dozens of groups that have more overlap than they realize.

So I’ve been making it my mission to find ways to bring groups together, especially when they have things in common but might not know it yet.

You can’t force these kinds of experiences, but we can create the conditions and extend the invitations.

And it’s been SO fun to see the plan working.

From Good Neighbors to the Global Stage

Our 5pm happy hour toasts rolled straight into a very special celebration with local roots and an Indy Hall connection!

Aziz and Vic are part of the team behind Plothole – the one that won our Good Neighbors Hackathon back in March.

Since then, they went on to participate in Code.tv’s newest show “The Full Stack” with the goal of turning their project into a real civic benefit business!

We hosted a live watch party at Indy Hall for the first episode as they competed for the best business in the challenge.

Members came for happy hour, met Vic and Aziz and the rest of the team, and made new friends while watching the first episode and playing mini games inspired by the show.

You don’t have to be a developer to appreciate what they pulled off — it was a night to connect, have fun, find your people, and cheer on two Philly builders on a global stage.

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While I can’t hold a torch to Bill Pullman’s speech from the 1996 film by the same title, I have been thinking about the ways that independence can actually bring us together.

Right now, cities across the country — including Philadelphia — are buzzing with World Cup energy. Groups of strangers are crowding into bars, parks, and living rooms to watch matches together.

People who’d never share a table any other day are suddenly side by side, experiencing the same thing in real time.

Sound familiar?

Independence is usually framed as a solo act. Go your own way. Make your own rules. Build something on your terms.

For some, that’s freelancing and entrepreneurship. For others, it’s the freedom to simply choose where you work, and the people you work alongside.

All of these experiences reveal something we know to be true, and yet feels counterintuitive enough that we often need help remembering:

Independence is better together.

In 2006, I found a group of freelancers and independent workers who together realized that working alone made work harder.

Not because we needed a boss or a team, but because we needed people to eat lunch with. To bounce ideas off. To celebrate wins with. To sit with when things are hard.

That’s what “Indy” in Indy Hall actually means. Not independence as isolation. Independence as a choice — and then immediately turning around and choosing each other.

I’ve loved seeing countries and cultures bond over the last few weeks as people from around the globe found new adopted homes and communities. Scotland in Boston. South Korea in Mexico. Global citizens falling in love with Philadelphia for the first time.

The world is still messy and painful. But when we choose to be together, everything gets a little bit better.

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You might remember back in March when we hosted our first ever “Good Neighbors” hackathon, with the goal of bringing together people from across a bunch of often siloed corners of our city.

Designers, developers, writers, artists, and makers of all kinds sharing a room and a mission for the day was amazing and ever since, we’ve been looking for ways to recapture and recreate that energy.

My theory is this: right now, I’ve gotten so much from meeting and building real relationships with the organizers and members of the many meetup communities we host.

But because they share the clubhouse on different nights, connections across those groups is pretty rare.

Not zero — when those crossovers DO happen through meetup collaborations, amazing things happen and the ecosystem grows stronger.

How could we do it without organizing a huge event like a hackathon?

Our answer is Neighborhood Nights, the newest evolution of after hours coworking at the Indy Hall Clubhouse, made possible by the generous support of our friends at Clerk.com!

About a month ago we connected with Clerk because they’d already had very positive experiences with the Philly tech and creative community, and wanted to do more.

I shared our vision for a more connected and supported ecosystem. How supporting one event is meaningful, but supporting a whole season of events is where we really get to level up.

They loved the vision and wanted to be a part of it!

So in addition to supporting a cluster of aligned event partners in our ecosystem, their generous support gives us the resources to launch Neighborhood Nights as a free evening coworking session specifically designed to be the intersection of the Philly meetup ecosystem.

What started as a scrappy internal experiment is morphing into a free & open coworking session for Indy Hall members and an entire extended family of Philadelphia community builders and their members, including Philly PUG, Philly Game Mechanics, Reading Club, Philly JS, Civic Tech Happy Hour, Drink & Draw Philly, PHL Code Club, House of Poets, Philly.rb, Code for Philly, 5th Square, and more.

Please join me in thanking Clerk for their support — not just for this event, but for working with us to invest in the infrastructure that lets dozens of independent communities who share a home become better connected and level up.

That’s exactly the kind of “together” that makes independence worth choosing.

If you’d like to attend a future Neighborhood Night, or get your meetup or community group involved as part of our extended family of community builders, send me a note.

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Summertime has a way of scrambling everything you thought was your routine.

Seasonal stuff opens up, like John’s Water Ice, a seasonal fav here in Philly. Other stuff closes!

Even if you’re staying local, scheduling anything or trying to hit a deadline involves someone else’s travel schedule.

And depending on the week, Friday afternoons can suddenly belong to nobody, or everybody. 😅 That’s just summer, right?

Well if you’re an Indy Hall member — or you’ve been thinking about becoming one — summer is actually a good time to pay attention to how we’ve built flexibility into everything we do, on purpose.

All of our memberships are always month to month (with 30 days notice for cancellation), but we’ve added even MORE ways to keep Indy Hall flexible during the times of year that demand it the most.

Here are two that are most relevant during the “that’s just summer” flux:

For members: Request a Rollover Month

If you know you’ll be in and out this summer, now’s a great time to look at your calendar and request a rollover month.

Typically, the coworking days and room credits included with our memberships expire each month.

But twice a year, we allow you to request a rollover month that keeps that month’s credits in your account for a year!

Here’s how Rollover Months work:

1. You tell us which membership cycle (30-day period) you plan to be away. Unlike a downgrade or cancel that require 30 days, you can do this anytime BEFORE the start of that membership cycle!
2. We’ll convert your day passes and room credits from that membership cycle into rollover credits.
3. As long as you continue paying your regular membership dues for that rollover month, you can use those rollover credits anytime in the next 12 months.
4. Your membership automatically returns to normal for the next 30-day period.

Rollover credits are available for all membership tiers, and can be used up to 2x per year. Months can be consecutive or non-consecutive.

Just submit the form and we handle the rest!

For everyone else: get a Clubhouse Card

Need a reason to get out of the house, but not ready to commit to a membership?

Our Clubhouse Card includes five days of coworking that you can use anytime, for 40% less than buying them individually!

No monthly subscription, no expiration pressure, no “am I using this enough?” math.

Just enough to create a new summer routine, and meet some of our regulars.

You can also treat this like a trial run for a membership, if you’re on the fence! In fact, almost everyone who has finished their five included days ended up joining at the end.

Not because of any high pressure sales (that’s not our style), but because they finally remembered what it felt like to work around people who actually give a damn about what (and how) they’re doing.

Summer is a good time to remember that.

If you’ve been thinking about it, this is a low-commitment way to find out if Indy Hall is your kind of place.

And if it helps sweeten the deal…one more roofdeck photo with a sunset 😎

Questions about either one? Send me a note.

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Every first Thursday, our friends at Philly Game Mechanics host a video game playtest night at the Indy Hall Clubhouse, and this month we had THREE special guests — local-made arcade cabinets loaded with indie games made by the PGM community.

After a bit of discussion, we agreed to welcome the Phillytron 2 (shown above in the kitchen) to reside at the clubhouse for members to play for a while!

Not Our First Arcade Cabinet

Eagle-eyed readers will note that I called it the Phillytron 2, which implies the existence of Phillytron 1.

Phillytron 2 is the latest build from PGM member and game cabinet designer Brandon Weiss. If you remember the Hugby table in the kitchen for a while late last year, that was another one of Brandon’s creations we got to enjoy!

The original Phillytron was created back in 2017, and after a maiden voyage to Magfest, lived at our previous space from 2018 until we moved out in 2020.

This past Thursday BOTH Phillytrons showed up at the clubhouse — the original and the new one — along with a THIRD cabinet built by Drexel students.

But here’s where it gets wild: that third one had a familiar…face?

Adam did a bit of digging and figured out that it was ANOTHER one of our former game cabinets!

This one started life as a Mortal Kombat 3 cabinet that landed in Indy Hall’s meeting room in 2013, for $150, thanks to a tip from longtime member and Geekadelphia co-founder Eric Smith.

That cabinet changed hands a few times, eventually landing with a group of Drexel students who converted it into their own local game cabinet.

A cabinet that left this community and came home a decade later, rebuilt into something new by the next generation of game designers.

Life isn’t all fun and games. But on the long arc, maybe more of it is games than we realize.

Learn more about Brandon Weiss’s work →

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Fans of Taskmaster, have you heard about Philly’s own local version “Challenge Accepted”?

It’s genuinely one of the most fun things to come out of Philly’s comedy community.

Executive producer Jillian Hartman and her team have created a live comedy competition where contestants take on absurd challenges and the results are as hilarious as you’d hope.

Think Taskmaster or Game Changer, but also entirely its own thing. The live show experience is very special.

A few Indy Hall members are now involved with the production — and maybe more crossovers are in the works.

The show’s fundraiser for Season 2 is now live on Seed & Spark, seeking the resources to support bigger and better challenges while maintaining the high production quality from the previous shows.

Please share this with any fans of local comedy!

Back the campaign on Seed & Spark →