Your Team Offsite Deserves Something Nicer Than a Hotel Ballroom

The work offsite meeting deserves better real estate.

Hotel ballrooms feel like 1997. Restaurants are loud and lack privacy. The office — the obvious fallback — is often too small, or simply too familiar to spark the kind of thinking you're trying to unlock. So organizations cobble together a patchwork of spaces, spending real money across multiple vendors for a disjointed experience that underdelivers on both productivity and connection.

A new concept launching in the Southeast is betting there's a better model.

How The Spaces Work

Forum & Social is developing a network of private venues purpose-built for business meetings, client hosting, and organizational events. Unlike a coworking space or event hall, each location is designed around a single premise: that the decisions and the relationship-building that follows when a team gets together shouldn't happen in two separate places.

“Organizations are already spending this money — they’re just spending it inefficiently across multiple venues. We built something that keeps it all in one private, intentional space. Forum and Social combines two spaces in one, where decisions and connection can be made in the same space,” says Forum & Social’s founder Drew Clark.

The concept is built on a private reservation model. Organizations book blocks of time rather than seats, preserving the privacy and control of the entire space.

Forum & Social structures its offering around two core booking types. Work Blocks are oriented toward focused, high-output sessions — lunch-and-learns, corporate strategy offsites, and advisory board meetings. Main Event Blocks are built for client entertainment, donor gatherings, and team events where connection is the primary objective. Organizations can also book a Full Day that spans both.

Pricing starts at $5,000 for a Work Block, $7,000 for a Main Event Block, and $9,000 for the full-day experience, with rates varying by market. Each booking includes a dedicated on-site operator to manage logistics so the team can stay focused on the work — or the people — in front of them.

Starting In The Southeast

Clark is building Forum & Social alongside Charlotte-based co-founder Leah Stafford. Their initial five markets — Atlanta, Charlotte, Jacksonville, Orlando, and Tampa — were selected based on density of corporate headquarters, professional services firms, foundations, nonprofits, and institutional leadership organizations.

The company is currently accepting early reservations for Q3 and Q4 events while finalizing site locations across each city.

The pitch isn't that Forum & Social is the cheapest option. It's that it's the most efficient one. By consolidating venue spend into a single environment, work meetings will become more productive and more organized.

The Evolution of the Third Space

The concept of the "third space" — a physical social environment distinct from home ("first place") and the traditional workplace ("second place") — has long shaped how communities gather. But in the post-COVID era, as organizations have grappled with the new dynamics of how we live, work, and connect, a new category has emerged: spaces that deliberately blur the line between workspaces and playspaces.