Harvest Moves Into EV Experience Centre
For the past eight years, the iconic East Village Experience Centre has been the joint sales, marketing and community space in EV. It was designed and created as a storytelling hub that laid out—in models, words, art, film and activities—the vision for a new kind of downtown living. Today, the vision has literally come to life: the East Village experience is being lived every day by more than 4,000 residents, by the visitors to EV’s restaurants and retail, and by those who enjoy amenities like RiverWalk, St. Patrick’s Island and the Central Library. Since the Experience Centre has always been considered a “living building”, it’s only fitting that the neighbourhood’s growing commercial life would be matched by a new chapter for the space.
Enter Harvest, a venture builder for the Prairies that connects founders and tech talent with world-class services to grow startups into globally-competitive companies. Since moving into its current space in M2 on RiverWalk last year, it has been steadily scaling up. With more and more staff joining their team, the not-for-profit venture builder has now outgrown the riverfront space and will additionally occupy 8,000 sq. ft. in the former East Village Experience Centre.
Harvest is the latest of several innovators to set up shop here in East Village—along with other newcomers like Platform Calgary and U of C’s School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape—making the community a growing hub of innovation, technology and entrepreneurism.
Haven’t heard of Harvest? You might recognize the name of its founder, Chris Simair, the former CEO and co-founder of SkipTheDishes. “Our vision at Harvest is to make the Canadian Prairies an epicentre for innovation and technology,” says Simair. “We have the opportunity to create one of Canada’s great tech hubs in Calgary’s downtown, and East Village is ideal for us—we like its proximity to other great residential communities, restaurants and RiverWalk. It’s an inspiring working and living environment for our team.”
The folks at Harvest are not only dedicated to applying their deep entrepreneurial knowledge to helping Prairie-based businesses go global, they’re also active community members who frequent East Village shops, cafes and restaurants—and live right here in the residential buildings, too. We’re looking forward to Harvest adding their people and vibrancy to the community!