Four years after it joined the ChangeX platform, Grow Remote has a global footprint and is helping local communities to combat social isolation.

When Grow Remote co-founder Tracy Keogh was looking for a way to scale her fledgling organisation and make it easier for remote workers to connect with each other and their communities, she got in touch with ChangeX. 

With our help, Tracy figured out how to empower people to become Grow Remote leaders in their own communities, by packaging the idea via our platform and guiding people through the process of starting a local chapter. Within a couple of months of joining the ChangeX platform in 2018, Grow Remote had 42 chapters across Ireland and a few in other countries. 

Fast forward four years and there are now about 170 Grow Remote chapters dotted across the world, from Carlow to Cape Town and Valentia to Virginia, with more than 2,600 team members.

Scaling via ChangeX

“ChangeX made that international growth a lot easier,” says Dónal Kearney, Grow Remote’s Community Manager. 

“As a platform, it makes it just as easy for someone in Wyoming to join as someone in west Cork. It’s a really good way to give people the tools they needed to become chapter leads.”

Through its partnership with employers, its training programmes and its network of Grow Remote chapters, Grow Remote aims to give people more choice and more flexibility around employment, and in turn, create connected, sustainable local communities.

Dónal explains that most chapters work towards three broad goals: repopulating local areas, boosting local employment and creating social connection.

“Social isolation is a big problem for remote workers,” he says. “It’s one of the biggest challenges of managing a professional career from home or from a co-working space. Social meet-ups or gatherings are one really tangible way to build community.”

The Covid catalyst

From 2018 to 2020, Grow Remote had already seen a “seismic shift” in the conversation around remote working, but then, in March 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic changed the landscape completely.

“Covid has certainly accelerated the conversation around remote working,” he says. However, he says that the pandemic has also created some confusion about remote working.

“There’s a misunderstanding about what remote work is, and that confusion arises from equating it to working from home during a pandemic.”

“Lots of organisations have had staff working from home over the last two years but they don’t necessarily know how to manage remote teams,” Dónal says. “And some aren’t really interested in learning because they are waiting to get back to their old routine in the office, where they know how to manage. They don’t have the tech solutions or software to manage remote work. But it has become the norm. Which means that when people think about remote work, it’s in that context, where everything is difficult and there’s a sense that remote working as an experiment isn’t working.”

In contrast, he says that remote-first organisations are “all about making it work for distributed teams”. “There’s an education piece to be done there about what good remote working looks like, and we have some courses built around that to help employers upskill so they can manage remote teams effectively,” he explains.

Grow Remote is actively building relationships with employers and creating training programmes to help drive the remote working conversation forward. For example in September 2021, it launched a remote working alliance with four major Irish employers (Vodafone, ESB, eBay and Liberty Insurance).

“In the past, the conversation on remote working was often very ‘top down’,” Dónal says. “The shift during Covid is that companies are listening to their people.”

Community connections

When Covid resulted in many workers setting up shop at dining tables across the world, it gave people a glimpse of the possibility remote working could offer, Dónal explains.

“Before, so many people were commuting or driving into a city to sit in a room to email each other,” he says. “Instead, what if those people spent their days working where they live and having an economic impact on their town. There’s a big potential footprint there, and a big opportunity for people to feel more connected to their area, have more time and participate more actively in their community.”

Dónal explains that social impact is at the core of Grow Remote’s mission, making it a natural fit for the ChangeX platform. “What Grow Remote does is try to harness those people who are working remotely to lead social impact in their areas,” he says.

“Individuals feel connected to each other and their local space. They have relationships locally, they feel invested in that place. So there’s a benefit to them personally but also if there’s a group of those people who meet up weekly or monthly for a coffee or an activity, they are bringing value to their community whether it’s economically or socially by getting together to do something like a litter pick or a beach clean.”

As well as managing the wider Grow Remote community, Dónal also leads his local chapter in Balbriggan in north Dublin (see banner image for a photo from their first in-person meet-up!). He sees a growing trend towards people wanting a richer, more purposeful life, with more community connection.

“There’s a real movement in the last decade of social action. It’s building and building. Social and environmental action really matters to people. ChangeX facilitates that and Grow Remote is trying to promote that all the time.”

Dónal says that ChangeX makes it “so easy” for people who want to start a local Grow Remote chapter to take their first steps. “For example, our west Cork chapter lead recently spoke to me about how the 30-day challenge was really helpful for him, gave him ideas and kept him on track,” he says. 

He’s hopeful that 2022 will bring more in-person events for Grow Remote chapters around the world. “It’s been difficult when offline events have been effectively cancelled, but we have managed to launch a few chapters in person,” he says.

In late 2021, Grow Remote launched a new chapter in Dundalk, driven by local chapter lead Ciara Breen. “They hosted a community development workshop on what people want to see in Dundalk and how they can come together to make that happen,” he says. “In late February, Ciara organised a lunch for remote workers in the town centre and it was a really positive experience. Together, they are building a community of remote workers who are motivated to make change in their town. That’s exactly what we are trying to create with Grow Remote.”

Start or join a Grow Remote chapter