About the Collective
One block at a time
We didn't set out to build a network. We set out to find each other.
Our story
It started with
a question
NBWC started with a simple idea: the most interesting women in Greenpoint, Williamsburg, and Bushwick are already out here building — they just hadn't all met yet.
The first gathering was small and slightly awkward, the way first gatherings are. A dozen people in a borrowed studio, most of whom had walked past each other on Manhattan Avenue for years without knowing what the other one did.
By the end of it, two people had agreed to work together and someone had found a bookkeeper. That's still roughly the measure of a good night.
What grew from there wasn't a networking group. It was a fellowship — a set of people who answer each other's questions, show up to each other's openings, and send work across the table without keeping score.
Mission
To build a fellowship where women in North Brooklyn can find each other, work together, and make the neighbourhood stronger for it.
Our values
Five things
we hold to
Not a poster in a break room. These are the things we actually screen for, and the things that get someone asked to leave.
Membership is a verb. The directory is only as useful as the people willing to answer it, and the events only work if the room fills.
Referrals, introductions, and advice move before anyone asks for anything back. The people who get the most out of this are the ones who put the most in, and it isn't close.
We'd rather hear what went wrong last quarter than what's on your website. Nobody here needs the pitch — we need the actual problem, so we can help with it.
Members' details are there so people can connect, never so anyone can broadcast. No bulk outreach, no cold pitching, no adding people to lists they didn't join. This one costs you your membership.
Greenpoint, Williamsburg, Bushwick. The radius is the point — it's what makes a coffee a real possibility instead of a scheduling problem.
Meet the founder
Who started this
[FOUNDER NAME]
[FOUNDER TITLE] · [NEIGHBOURHOOD]
[FOUNDER BIO — two or three short paragraphs. What she does, how long she's been in North Brooklyn, and the moment she realised this needed to exist. Written in her own voice, first person or third, but consistent with the rest of the site.]
[Second paragraph — what she's building now, and what she wants the Collective to be in five years.]
What makes us different
Two lists
- A room where you collect business cards nobody calls back.
- A paid membership with a tiered pricing table.
- A lead-generation list dressed up as a community.
- A panel of five people talking at forty.
- Open to anyone who fills in a form.
- A directory of women who answer when you write to them.
- Free, and staying that way.
- Small enough that people recognise each other.
- Long tables, studio floors, and walks around McCarren.
- Reviewed by a person, one application at a time.