03-how-to-start-a-school

How to Start a School

This guide is for someone who has decided to start a People’s Free School in their community and wants to know what comes next.

If you have not yet read the Founding Statement and the Pedagogy document, start with those. This guide assumes you have.

Read together first

Before you call yourselves a school, read We Make the Road by Walking with a few people. The book is itself a model of what the school tries to do. Reading it together gives your initial group a shared reference point and a felt sense of the practice. It also tests whether the group has the patience for slow, collective work. If reading one book together is more than the group can sustain, the school will not survive its first six months.

Five or six weeks is a reasonable pace. Meet weekly or every other week. Take a chapter or section at a time. At each meeting, share what struck you, what confused you, what connected to your own life. Practice the opening and closing rituals described in the opening and closing practices document. Notice what works and what does not.

When the group finishes the book, you will know whether to continue.

Form a core group

A school does not need many people to start. Three or four committed adults can sustain a study circle. Eight to twelve is comfortable for a session. Beyond fifteen, sessions get harder to facilitate and you should consider running two parallel groups instead.

The core group should share a few things:

• Willingness to facilitate, prepare, and clean up, not just attend.
• Commitment to the pedagogy, including the parts that feel uncomfortable (no expert in the room, reflective practice, content driven by the room rather than by a syllabus from above).
• Some range of experience and background. A core group of people who all know each other from the same workplace or the same political formation will produce a school that struggles to grow beyond that base.

What the core group does not need:

• Credentials. None. The school does not care what degrees anyone has.
• Agreement on every political question. The school holds disagreement as part of the work.
• A leader. The core group operates by consensus or by simple democratic process. Rotation of facilitation is built in.

Choose a first theme

The first theme should be chosen by the core group based on what is alive for them and for the community they are part of. Some prompts that may help:

• What is happening in town that people are confused, angry, or curious about?
• What organizing campaign is underway that political education would support?
• What question keeps coming up in informal conversation among people you know?
• What did your reading of We Make the Road by Walking surface that the group wants to go further on?

You do not need to start with “How Capitalism Works” just because it is theme one in the library. Start where the heat is. The library is a pool to draw from, not a sequence to march through.

A first theme should be:

• Concrete enough that the room can connect to it from their own lives.
• Broad enough that the five lenses each have material to work with.
• Limited enough that a six- to eight-session arc can do it justice.

Examples of well-scoped first themes:

• “What does work do to us, and what can we do about it?” (theme: labor, work, and organizing)
• “Why is housing so expensive, and what can be done?” (combines theme 1 on capitalism, theme 4 on the household, theme 6 on state and power)
• “How does this country make its money work in the rest of the world?” (theme: imperialism)
• “What is mutual aid actually, and how do you do it?” (theme: anarchism, mutual aid, and prefiguration)

Find a space

The school needs a place to meet. Some options:

• A union hall, if you have a connection to organized labor.
• A public library meeting room. Most public libraries offer free rooms to community groups.
• A church basement or fellowship hall, if there is a sympathetic congregation in town.
• A community center, mutual aid space, or social club.
• A member’s home, if the group is small enough and the host is willing.
• An outdoor space, in good weather, like a park pavilion or a backyard.

Things to consider:

• Accessibility. Is the space accessible to people with mobility limitations? Is it on a transit line? Is there parking?
• Cost. Free is better. The school does not charge for sessions and should not be paying rent in its first year.
• Comfort. A circle of chairs beats rows. Tables help for note-taking. Coffee, tea, and snacks help everything.
• Hours. Many public spaces close early. Confirm the space is available when the room needs it.
• Privacy. Some topics are easier to discuss without strangers wandering through.

Schedule the work

Common rhythms:

• Weekly study circle, six to eight sessions. Focused, intensive, builds momentum. Best for deeply engaging one theme with a stable group.
• Biweekly sessions, ongoing. Slower, more sustainable, allows more people to participate. Better for groups where many participants have unpredictable schedules.
• Monthly intensive sessions, three to four hours each. Allows for deeper material in each session. Requires more from participants but produces strong cohesion.
• Weekend or daylong intensive, once or twice a year. Brings people together for sustained work that weekly sessions cannot reach. Excellent for foundational themes, retreats, or moments of organizational need.

Most schools find a primary rhythm and supplement it with occasional intensives. See the session templates for guidance on each format.

Prepare your first session

Once you have a theme, a space, a date, and a core group, you can plan your first session.

For a single session, see the single session template. For a multi-week arc, see the study circle template.

A facilitator (or pair of facilitators) takes responsibility for the session. They choose the readings, films, or other materials, write a session plan, and prepare the opening and closing prompts. They are not the teacher. They are the host of the room.

Other people in the core group take care of the space (setup, snacks, cleanup), invite participants, and document what happens (notes, photos if appropriate, anything that helps the school remember itself).

Invite participants

Some thoughts on outreach:

• Start with personal invitations. People you know, people they know. The school grows through trust before it grows through publicity.
• Be clear about what people are coming to. The pedagogy is different from what most adults have experienced in school. Name that in the invitation.
• Do not call it a class. Call it a study circle, a workshop, a gathering, a session.
• Make clear that no prior reading is required for first sessions, and that the school is free.
• Use whatever channels work in your community. Flyers, social media, neighborhood listservs, organizational newsletters, word of mouth.

If you are operating as a project of a chapter or organization, the chapter’s existing networks are your first outreach pool. Beyond that, think about who has stake in the topic but might not see themselves as part of the political formation that hosts the school. The school’s value comes partly from bringing those people into conversation.

After the first session

Debrief with the core group within a few days. Some questions:

• What worked? What did not?
• Who came? Who did not come who you hoped would? Who came who you did not expect?
• What surfaced in discussion that the school should return to?
• What does the next session need to do?
• What do facilitators need to be better prepared for?

Adjust based on what you learn. The school is a living project. It will look different in month six than in month one. That is the point.

Document and share

If you are using a forked or cloned version of the People’s Free School repository, document what you are doing. Notes from sessions, lists of materials you used, things you learned. This serves your own group (you can return to it later, new facilitators can learn from it) and it serves the broader project (other groups starting schools learn from your experience).

Consider contributing back. Pull requests to the main repository with new resources, session notes, or examples of work in your community help every other group that uses the model. See the contributing guide for details.

Sustaining the school over time

A school that runs for six months is a victory. A school that runs for two years and changes the political life of a community is a different kind of victory.

Things that help schools last:

• Rotation of facilitation. No one person carries the whole load. Build a bench of facilitators from your participants.
• Variety of formats. Mix study circles, single sessions, film screenings, and occasional intensives.
• Connection to organizing. A school that exists alongside real political work feeds and is fed by that work. A school that exists in isolation tends to become academic in the bad sense.
• Reflective practice at the school level, not just the session level. Quarterly or yearly, the core group asks: what is the school becoming? Is that what we want? What needs to change?
• Generous handoff. When founders move on, the school should be able to continue without them. Build for handoff from the start.

Questions and contact

If you are starting a school and have questions, the project maintainers are happy to hear from you. See the repository README for contact information.

You are not alone in this work. Schools are starting elsewhere too. We learn from each other.