Rescue shackspace, the german hackerspace in Stuttgart

I'm starting a hackerspace in Bilbao and will probably find myself in the same situation in 1-2 years. We have a huge awesome space (944m^2) for free but if it gets sold or rented we'll have to move out. The plan is to use this year to recruit members and save money to be able to rent a smaller place when we move out.

What you should do is just raise the fees for the members. 20e (8 for students) is a really low monthly fee for a hackerspace. Lots of spaces have monthly fees around 80$ with some reduced memberships (40-50$) for students or "starving hackers". Until now you were able to keep the membership cheap since you weren't paying rent but you should definitely raise the fees, a lot, if you want to survive.

I guess that you have already debated and voted on this. If you raise the fee so drastically you will probably lose half the members but at least you won't have to depend on donations. A couple years ago I was part of local Linux Users Group, we had a nice space with only 20 members and a 75e monthly fee. Raising the fee to pay the rent filtered the the people who didn't really commit to the project.

Find a smaller place if you need to but reducing the group to people who really "get it" will probably get you a smaller and much nicer hackerspace. Of course, if someone cannot pay but is really interested and can help around, you should make some exceptions.

The site says that you need 3000-3500e to move. If you have 80 members it's just 40euros per member, if the members really want to have a hackerspace it shouldn't be too hard to reach.