Despite their numbers, LA’s cultural creators often find themselves disjointed and separate. Sure, those reliable Angeleno whipping boys “sprawl” and “cars” may be to blame for the disconnect, but the newly minted Hub LA Media Lab office is looking to change that with a collaborative work environment for creative types who are also interested in social issues.
The Media Lab at Hub LA in DTLA’s Arts District is led by Julie Lebedev, who also works as a movie producer.
“The life of a movie producer can be very isolating,” Lebedev says. “Before Hub, I was feeling like an island. When you’re supposed to be creating and having those juices flowing, working in a vacuum has the opposite effect.”
Lebedev, who was born in LA but grew up in Moscow, teamed up with Hub, a communal workspace/membership club with more than 30 locations worldwide, to establish a place where itinerant creatives can come together in LA.
Access to Hub starts at $75 a month. Different levels of membership include access to different facilities, including a screening room, edit bays, business accelerators and even legal and accounting teams. Higher membership fees also include access to Hub’s busy social calendar. Applicants must go through an interview process where they are asked to describe how their projects enhance the social good. The Media Lab targets “Social Enterprises,” or dual-purpose businesses that focus on both profit and social issues.
An art wall at Hub LA.
Hub takes advantage of the popular “B-Corp” designation, a corporate label that identifies as business as more than a profit-engine, but as equal facilitator of profit and social good. HML extends the B-Corp model to filmmaking and mediamaking. “It’s about democratizing access for people with whom profit is not the bottom line,” Lebedev says.
LA news staples Good Magazine and TakePart.com, Participant Media’s socially conscious news arm, are both involved with Hub LA, and were represented at a recent launch event. I met a CEO of an LA-based ecologically-friendly fireplace company, two people behind the Westedge Design Fair in Santa Monica and representatives from a company with the slogan “Movie-in-a-box” that offers micro-budget filmmakers a truck full of everything you need to make a movie, literally everything, for $4,000 a day. All attendees seemed to share Hub’s possibly paradoxical dialectic, profit combined with altruism.
The logical result of a shared working community is that some of those itinerant workers “cross-pollinate” each other with their ideas and opinions.
Lebedev was inspired to found Hub Media Lab on a recent shoot in Ireland.
“There was a facility there that had different directors housed in different offices in one building,” she says. “I thought it was a great idea. They were all working on different projects, but they all met for lunch and talked and exchanged ideas. I wanted to implement that model in LA.”
The exterior of Hub LA
I found an example of cross-pollination in one of HML’s prettier offices. One desk belongs to a successful documentary producer and just a few feet away, an adjacent desk belongs to a principle employee of IMDB, who is also involved with Amnesty International. The office next door is occupied by Very Nice Design, a design company that gives 40 percent of their work to nonprofits.
“A lot of our members are merging technology with civic elements,” Lebedev says. “HML has an amazing capacity to get everyone to help each other. I hate to call in networking, but in a way it’s a form of networking, just not in the traditional LA sense, not in the Hollywood sense. It’s about changing communities in really cool ways.”
You can find Hub Media Lab on 830 Traction Ave. in the Arts District.
Follow Isaac Simpson on Twitter at @Isaco525.
