In Delaware’s rural Sussex County, a different kind of coworking hub is taking root.
Historically, nearly all of Delaware’s startup and coworking infrastructure has been clustered in New Castle County, which is home to more than half of the state’s population and includes its largest economic hubs in and around Wilmington and Newark.
“Groups come down and say … ‘Where do I need you? I need you in Georgetown.’”
Peggy Geisler, Sussex County Health Coalition
But there are plenty of entrepreneurs, nonprofit leaders and remote workers south of the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal, which informally serves as a dividing line between upstate and downstate. And they have long felt isolated. Without dedicated spaces, many have made do with kitchen tables, coffee shops or long drives.
A new project in Georgetown is trying to change that.
The Rural Innovation Hub, a coworking and collaboration space launched by the Sussex County Health Coalition, opened in December with a goal that’s both practical and ambitious: to give southern Delaware organizations and entrepreneurs a physical place to work, meet and collaborate across sectors.
“There are a lot of groups that say they’re statewide, and yet they don’t have a footprint in Sussex,” said Peggy Geisler, executive director of the health coalition and a driving force behind the hub.
With the high cost of brick-and-mortar leases, she said, the coworking space helps make a Sussex County presence more accessible.
Filling a long-standing downstate gap
Located in central Georgetown, a town of about 7,000 people best known for its chicken farms and Perdue processing facility, the Rural Innovation Hub includes three anchor offices, five smaller incubation offices and shared coworking desks.
The space also features a flexible learning center that seats about 30 people and a boardroom for roughly a dozen, separated by a folding wall system that allows the rooms to open into a larger space for networking events. The space was built with financial support from the Longwood Foundation.
Unlike many coworking spaces that focus primarily on startups or freelancers, the hub reflects Sussex County’s nonprofit-oriented ecosystem. Current occupants and members include:
- Spotlight Delaware
- The Delaware Alliance for Nonprofit Advancement
- Delaware Futures
- The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) Delaware
- The Parent Information Center
Organizations with plans to use the space include Zip Care, Zip Code Wilmington’s healthcare workforce development offshoot. In addition, The Haitian Coalition of Delaware, a partner organization that has received foundational support from the Sussex County Health Coalition, has access to space and resources, as does Attack Addiction, a volunteer-run Delaware organization offering substance use disorder education and recovery resources.
All that means the space does have a business focus, Geisler noted. “A nonprofit is a business with a different tax identifier,” she said. “There’s a boss. There are employees. They’re solving problems.”
The hub is also open to remote workers and entrepreneurs who don’t need a full dedicated office. Monthly memberships allow users to work from the shared area, access meeting rooms and participate in events without committing to a lease.
The hub’s launch follows years of reporting — including by Technical.ly — showing the divide between rising interest in remote work below the canal and a lack of places for those workers to gather.
During the pandemic-era remote work boom, downstate workers described feeling isolated despite rapid population growth and expanding broadband access. Even as coworking concepts gained traction, including a Delaware State University-run business incubator in Dover and plans for a Mill location in Seaford, much of Sussex County remained without a central hub.
Geisler said the hub’s location was chosen to address that gap. “Groups come down and say, ‘We opened a shop over in Rehoboth [Beach],’” Geisler said. “‘But where do I need you? I need you in Georgetown.’”
A platform for programs, not just desks
Beyond coworking, the Rural Innovation Hub is designed to support programming that already runs through the Sussex County Health Coalition. The organization trains community health workers, operates an apprenticeship program and regularly convenes nonprofits, funders and public agencies.
The space, located at 21133 Sterling Avenue in Georgetown, gives those efforts a permanent home, with room to expand. Geisler, the health coalition executive director who helped spearhead the project, envisions hosting networking events for remote workers, meet-the-funder sessions for nonprofits and entrepreneurs, and workshops focused on emerging tools such as artificial intelligence.
“I would love to do AI for entrepreneurs as well as AI for nonprofits,” Geisler said.
The hub will also support the coalition’s annual rural health conference in Dover, which is expected to take place in early June and focus on rural health innovation and the influx of new public funding aimed at transforming health care delivery in underserved areas.
While the hub is close to full occupancy, Geisler described it as a starting point rather than an endpoint.
“The space is not as big as I would have liked,” she said. “Maybe the space beside us will open up and we’ll expand.”
For now, the hub’s success may be measured less by square footage than by whether it becomes a recognizable gathering point for Sussex County’s often siloed innovation community.
“I believe there’s more energy down here than people give us credit for,” Geisler said. “If we want to acknowledge that, then we have to have structures that support it.”
Scroll to view more photos of the space.
