HACK Baltimore has a new downtown HQ

HACK Baltimore will have a headquarters near Inner Harbor thanks to a donation from the real estate conglomerate The Cordish Companies.

The civic tech nonprofit will be housed at 616 Water Street, right next to a cluster of tech companies. Through an agreement with Cordish, HACK Baltimore will be able to occupy the 3800 square-foot space rent-free for two years. It includes team meeting rooms, collaboration spaces, private areas for video conferences and a kitchenette.

HACK Baltimore was founded in 2018 with an aim to bring technologists into the work of solving the city’s pressing challenges, and creating solutions that last beyond a single event.

“This space is critical to providing us with a dedicated location to host meetups, design thinking and rapid response sessions, provide volunteer teams with space to discuss and create solutions and showcase the important work these groups are doing to develop sustainable solutions that can be implemented now,” Delali Dzirasa, CEO of Baltimore digital services company Fearless and co-chair of Hack Baltimore, said in a statement. He added that COVID-19 restrictions will be “strictly enforced” until larger gatherings are allowed.

In this new headquarters Hack Baltimore will have a space for its design jams and programs like the ETCAccelerate challenge, through which it partnered with the Emerging Technology Centers’ accelerator to identify entrepreneurs from the community and bring them closer to startup resources. It’ll also be a venue to continue collaboration with companies like Dent Education, Code for Baltimore and other members of the Baltimore Digital Equity Coalition.

For the Cordish Companies this is another foray to making an impact on Baltimore’s tech scene. Cordish is also behind Spark Baltimore, a coworking space for tech startups and entrepreneurs. Fearless one of the original companies to move into that space in 2016.

“We remain committed to supporting tech innovation and entrepreneurship in helping Baltimore’s ecosystem grow,” Reed Cordish, principal of The Cordish Companies, said in a statement.

Donte Kirby is a 2020-2022 corps member for Report for America, an initiative of The Groundtruth Project that pairs young journalists with local newsrooms. This position is supported by the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation.