The promise of the Information Age was that one day we would make our own work schedules and do so in lounge pants and hoodies from our breakfast bar. No more subway commute! No more fourth-floor typing pool!

How perfectly predictable, then, that in the face of such freedom, freelancers and telecommuters increasingly choose to rent cubicle space for their "businesses." They willingly join the 9-to-5 crowd shuffling along rush hour commutes to get to what's called co-working communities, shared work spaces, or "hives."

For some time now the Junior League of Little Rock has been quietly chugging along on a $1 million capital campaign, the end result of which, among other things, is a renovation of the top floor of the former Woman's City Club Building (League headquarters) for a co-working community for seven fledgling nonprofits -- 16 total employees who will share a conference room, a kitchen and bathroom, a printer and postage meter and office supplies, and a resource library.

It's being shepherded by Leaguer Jennifer Maune, who saw the concept work firsthand at the Charles A. Frueauff Foundation when she was executive director of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation a few years ago. Maune was the one and only paid staff member of the Arkansas chapter of the nonprofit when she was hired, and the position was work-from-home. Within two weeks she'd moved into the Frueauff Foundation.

The foundation has space for about four nonprofits, each one nested in its own office with one or two cubicles outside for support staff. It's in a chic and spare ground-floor River Market District building, and it asks for 1 percent of each nonprofit's operating budget (and an additional percent for each staffer). The year Maune began at Cystic Fibrosis, her budget was $150,000, so her first year "lease" was just $1,500.

"It really is a very unique and hugely impactful concept -- I know that all of the organizations housed there at that time saw huge growth," Maune says.

One of the nonprofit directors at the foundation when Maune moved in, and who moved on in 2010, is Jeff Spry, founder and director of City Connections, itself a nonprofit co-working community for faith-based organizations and volunteers (churchgoers) on the ground floor of the Cone Building I on West Markham Street.

"The Frueauffs were very gracious to me. They provided me a place to come and live in that community space, and I experienced what they were trying to accomplish," Spry said. "We went in to try and re-create something like that."

"He's literally one, I cried when he left," said Anna Kay Frueauff, a vice president at the charity that bears her name. (It was actually started in New York by her great-great-uncle.)

Spry's experience is this: Nearly everyone comes to charity with "a missioning outlook." That is, they have a calling to help people. They rarely have the accounting/administrative/organizational wherewithal to form that calling into what we workadays call "a job."

"They may or may not have the business savvy to effectively lead a 501(c)3, so here's a space where they have ... a support system and [a close space] they can benefit from one another in," he said.

On Monday morning, Dale Sharp and Kimberlee Roxburgh of the upstart Hope Rises, a nonprofit that got its 501(c)3 in May and aims to aid formerly incarcerated women, made their mission pitch to trauma counselor Esia Anders.

"There's all this expertise we didn't know we needed to have," Roxburgh said.

"We all have passion," Sharp acknowledged, "but not nonprofit management."

With all this practically free training and counsel, not to mention the quality bonhomie, what's to keep a charity from overstaying its welcome? From failing to wean?

On a rainy Tuesday night in October, the Single Parent Scholarship Fund raised more than $100,000 at Walter and Terry Quinn's River Ridge home. The joint was packed. Karin Bara, director of the fund's local chapter, said the haul amounted to about one-third of her approximately $330,000 budget.

This isn't a fledgling charity. Yet it's one of the four charities inside the Frueauff shared office.

"We would spend so much" if SPSF sought its own commercial lease space, Bara said. "We couldn't do what we do. We wouldn't be able to serve as many students as we serve."

"In this economy," where financial giving isn't on a steady climb year over year, in-kind donations and partnerships -- synergy! -- are "really an opportunity for business and community leaders and other philanthropically minded folks to step back and re-evaluate what community support and charitable giving really means. It's not just about writing a check," Frueauff said.

"Plus, there's really great energy here," Bara said.

Eventually, successful upstart charities hire support staff, then more support staff. They will outgrow the Junior League's Nonprofit Center, Maune said, which will cap each charity's occupancy at three staff members. The same is basically true for the Frueauff Foundation, which doubles and triples the lease for one, and then two support staff (as Spry's City Connections and Maune's Cystic Fibrosis Foundation eventually did).

The initial plan for the Nonprofit Center at the Junior League of Little Rock is to sign charities to an initial 12- to 15-month term with an option for renewal, Maune said. It's implied that center leaders will retain the privilege not to renew contracts in the event a charity has outgrown the center's warren.

Anyway, would it be so terrible if a Nonprofit Center tenant met with unimaginable fundraising success, giving it the appearance of taking advantage of the League's munificence?

"Our mission is to build and train civic leaders, women, in our community," Maune said, and not only that but to create a farm system of influence and leadership that continually replenishes the upper echelon.

That means celebrating success, not incrementally or modestly, but as the market would -- proportionally. "So it does create that cycle," she said.

High Profile on 07/13/2014