Salt Lake City Free Skool

Salt Lake City Free Skool: Always Learning Manifesto!

Since 2010, the SLC Free Skool has been a decentralized community education network in which skills, information, and knowledge are shared without hierarchy or the institutional environment of formal schooling.  Influenced and inspired by similar projects that exist across the world Always Learning acts directly as a challenge to existing models of education and societal organization.

We are an open and friendly group of autonomous volunteers who coordinate, organize and encourage the creation of free classes and events through the publication of a monthly calendar that is distributed by hand and also available on this website.

 How Free Skool Works

Currently, SLC’s Free Skool is made up of a small community of mostly radical minded folx interested in alternative ways of interacting, living and learning. There are certainly specific ways in which this Free Skool functions but we like the idea that that could change depending on who’s participating, or that many people could do Free Skool in their own ways. Think of it as a platform anyone could use to teach a class, host an event, organize a discussion, get people with similar interests together, or do specific activities together.

Teachers are responsible for planning, advertising and adding their class or event to the calendar but more seasoned Free Skoolers are available and happy to help you along the way. We have also added some tips and resources for new teachers on our TEACH page.

Organizers do a lot of the behind the scenes work of turning the digital calendar into a print calendar each month, maintaining and updating this website and other social media sites, and supporting teachers.

Want to be involved or participate?

We welcome and encourage you to get involved and help us out!  There are many ways you can be a part of SLC’s Free Skool. Write us at [email protected] or find the current month’s main organizers. But for now check out this list of stuff you could do:

• Attend some classes or events, including a monthly social potluck where we release the following month’s calendar!
• Teach a class or organize an event!  We love to see new classes/events from new people and have plenty of people and resources to help you organize. Check out the ‘Teach’ page and/or speak to an organizer to learn more.
• Create calendar art! Each month the calendar art is done by a different volunteer.
• Help distribute the printed calendars!
• Help organize! It takes many hands to make Free Skool a success each moth, there are many behind the scenes tasks we’d love your help with, like techie website stuff, maintaing the online calendar, and printing the physical calendar.
• Share your ideas! We love imput and ideas on how to make Free Skool better.

Sustainability Efforts

Because of the volunteer based nature of Free Skool organizations, SLC’s skool has ebbed and flowed over the years based on those volunteer’s time and evergy availability. We would love to have a consistent free skool that is self-sustaining and functions long term, but that’s sometimes a tricky objective to meet! One way of addressing this issue is a new organizer model we’re trying out, which consists of two main monthly organizers who have made two month overlapping commitments to organize for the Free Skool.