BY KAYLA SOSA | PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY MOMHIVE
momHIVE Empowers Working Moms
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hen Megan Dimmer joined momHIVE last October, it was because she wanted to be able to do it all: build up her marketing business, meet with her team, get work done outside the home and have affordable daycare for her twin toddlers. MomHIVE is a coworking space for women in Grand Rapids that provides on-site childcare. Located in a renovated house in Eastown, the space serves about 32 members a month and six children a day. There’s flexible seating and coworking space, meeting rooms and a kitchen. “The one thing I loved, beyond having the childcare, is just the energy of the people there — they’re all there to get stuff done,” Dimmer said. “At coffee shops, it can be really distracting because people are there for a variety of reasons and at home it’s distracting because I don’t have
anyone to watch my kids, so then I’m always on-call.” About a year ago, Alyssa Cairns was always on-call. She was working from home and taking care of her kids while trying to scale her interior design business. She met Kelli Palm and, after surveying Facebook mom communities, the pair co-founded momHIVE. “We knew it needed to be a space that was uniquely designed for women,” Cairns said. “We also knew having an element of childcare was going to be crucial because that’s the thing all of us were missing, was having a place to put our kids while we work.” Childcare at momHIVE is offered for four hours a day and is determined by the member mothers’ monthly schedules. The more childcare hours needed, the higher the cost of membership. Mothers have to stay in the coworking space while their child is being supervised.
MOMHIVE FOUNDERS ALYSSA CAIRNS AND KELLI PALM
“Working moms, they don’t necessarily want to quit their jobs, but they also feel enormous social pressure and personal pressure to be a good mom and be a good employee. Remote work actually gives you the independence of time and location to do the mom stuff and do the work stuff.” — Alyssa Cairns
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Women’s LifeStyle Magazine • May 2020
