Jason Rising is not your typical coworking founder. He didn’t come out of commercial real estate. He didn’t study flex space economics.
Instead, he spent decades coaching business owners through workshops, personality assessments, and seminars — and he loved every minute of it.
Then one day, he heard a podcast about churches starting coworking spaces. He was in the middle of planting a church and had a facility. Something clicked.
“I had a passion for coaching and consulting,” Jason says. “I worked in the business industry and a nonprofit, mostly helping coach people with Myers-Briggs, DISC, and other personality profiles, doing tons of team building, workshops, and seminars. I absolutely loved it. I loved working with business owners, solopreneurs, entrepreneurs, and small businesses. And I just had this big dream. I really want to have a space that I can help small business owners from, a place to build a community of people who share the same passions for personal growth and business development.”
That dream now has a name: Verge Cowork. It lives inside a church in Trappe, Pennsylvania, just outside Philadelphia in Montgomery County. And it is quietly becoming one of the most community-focused spaces in the town.
The idea started taking shape through a series of conversations, one connection leading to the next. Jason met Clark Rinehart, a coworking industry veteran who saw exactly what Jason was building before Jason could fully articulate it himself.
“What a great guy,” Jason says of Clark. “Knowledgeable and astute in the industry. He knows it from back to front. You get around him, and you’re gonna want to start a coworking space.”
Clark helped Jason craft the vision, understand the operations, and connect his existing skills as a coach and community builder to the coworking world. He also introduced Jason to Coworks software to manage the space.
“I knew what I wanted to do, but I didn’t really know how to do it,” Jason says. “He taught me how to do it. He was like, hey, you have the passion. And he saw how my skills could be valuable in the flex space, such as my coaching and consulting. He’s like, you can really apply this.”
It didn’t happen overnight. The first year was a challenge. Jason was trying to attract members to a new space in a community that was tight-knit and skeptical that this new multiuse space was going to work.
“I was the outsider,” he says. “So it was interesting to get inside. It took about three years.”
There was a moment early on when a member left because there simply weren’t enough people in the coworking space. She needed energy around her, and the community couldn’t give it to her yet. Just eight months later, she came back because the space she’d moved to was too loud.
And something had changed at Verge.
“She walked in and saw all these people. She’s like, ‘What happened?’ And I said, we got people,” Jason laughs.
The real turning point came when an organization started bringing its team of eight to ten people into Verge one day a week. Every Tuesday, the space filled up. It felt alive. Similar to having an anchor store in a strip plaza, IHS Global became Verge’s leading business to attract more people. That dedicated day started to bring members and fill in our other days.
“That was the actual thing that really started to turn business around,” Jason says.
Today, Verge is out of desks. Jason said it almost in passing, like it was a logistics problem he’d gotten around to solving: “I had someone out there talking to me about more desks, and I’m like, I know, but I just purchased four last month.”
He describes the membership in three buckets: work-from-home professionals who want to be around people, small business owners who need conference rooms and meeting space, and entrepreneurs and solopreneurs who are building something from scratch.
Jason is upfront that Verge is a nonprofit operation. The goal was never to build a revenue machine. It was to fill an empty building with life and give the surrounding community a place to work and grow.
“It’s not a business built to compete, per se,” he says. “It’s just to try to help build community and utilize the space. Working from home has many benefits, but one drawback is that it can also increase loneliness. We are curating space to not just build business but build people.”
That people-first instinct runs deep. He spent 25 years building community before Verge existed. And it shows in the way he operates the space.
“I believe heavily in servant leadership,” he says. “I’ve worked in building community wherever I went for 25 years. And that’s why I am so passionate about coworking: I just knew what we needed to do to connect and engage with the people, and I know how life-changing that can be for our mental health and quality of work.”
Just as the space is not empty, Jason is not sitting still. He has lunch-and-learns booked from now through August, and every one of them came from his natural networking instincts.
“I’m really comfortable with networking,” he says. “So I meet people who are in the business industry, and my mind quickly figures out what they’re experts in or proficient at, and then I’m inviting them into the space and creating a theme around their proficiency.”
Upcoming events feature the owner of a California Closets franchise talking about how to scale a business, a local therapist talking about mental health in the workplace, a bank manager talking about lending, and the local chamber of commerce talking about the power of networking. The idea is simple: put someone who’s done it in a room with the people who are trying to do it.
Jason is also building a strategic partnership with a business coach who focuses specifically on women CEOs. She’ll run mastermind groups out of Verge, and the members of those groups will have a dedicated place to work, receive coaching, and grow their businesses together.
Verge runs on Coworks software. Jason was introduced to the platform by Clark early on, and even though the cost felt like a stretch in the beginning, he committed. He’d done the math: the membership base wasn’t there yet, but the vision was.
And he has been approached about switching to a different platform. He’s not interested.
“I really do think Coworks is the best fit for me,” he says. “I’ve put a lot of time and energy into it early on. I’m not changing.”
What he appreciates most is not just the features, but the support. There was a door access issue — a frustrating, months-long integration challenge.
“This is not even a Coworks problem. And then they got it straightened out!”
He also points to the knowledge base and the chat support as things that have made a real difference for someone running a coworking space on the side of his other full-time work.
“Coworks has articles for everything,” he says. “Because when you don’t do it full-time, you don’t have all the time in the world. But I’ve learned a whole lot. They make things easy, and respond really well.”
Jason is actively looking to expand. More desks, more space, more programming. The limiting factor right now is time, not demand.
He’s also looking at business incubation, a vision he’s developing alongside Clark. It’s the natural next step for someone who has always thought of this space as a launching pad, not just a place to sit.
“Helping businesses get space for a good rate provides an opportunity to grow their business and not have to pay storefront prices,” Jason says. “They’re paying $100 a month for access to conference rooms, high-tech amenities, copier access, and more, and then they have access to a large space. That’s probably the thing we’re starting to see that’s really unpacking.”
He pauses for a second when asked about the goal of all of this. The answer is simple, even if it doesn’t fit neatly into a growth strategy.
“We just really want to see people thrive at what they do.”