The Library: It's yet to be decided how access to the book collection will be managed - whether to hire a space as a shared reading room, and which books can be lent out. A good many of the books I've sourced are hard to access and costly to replace. Book theft is a real temptation as we all know!

The Meetings: The discussion groups will probably be held in pubs or cafes; what we'd lose in control over the environment & in focus, we'd gain in connection with the wider world. But it also remains an open question.

Warning: This programme will only run if 36 people are ready to enrol by the end of October 2026, which would create:
 - 3 groups of 12 people to run 3 courses from section 1 (of the 6)
 - 4 groups of 9 people to run four courses from section 2 (of the 8)
 - and again, 3 groups of 12 people to run 3 courses from section 3 (of the 6)

Beyond that a cohort of 48, 60, or an ideal maximum of 72 people - at which point all 20 courses can run. In all likelihood participants will have to reach agreement on which courses to select.
 
Totally anticipated objections: How are people expected to have the time, the money - especially the time? If there's no qualification at the end of it, then... ? What is it I'm paying for? Are you're qualified? Why have you decided on the courses and the reading lists?

All valid. 18 or so hours a week is a big commitment; for most people it will require a significant reorganisation of their situation; no one is likely to be sitting around with 18 hours to suddenly give to something. But people do decide to pursue higher education courses with similar time requirements for part-time study, and continue to do so even though its an increasingly futile gesture as an economic strategy, and sometimes even counterproductive to getting a job. 

It's an overarching fact that every second of life under the system we're enmeshed in is compelled to be economically productive, so the once promised horizon of reduced work compulsion, more genuine leisure, longer-healthier lives has gone in reverse: the impact of social defeat. Women's social and economic freedom for my generation in the UK has been accompanied by rising housing costs and wage deflation such that they work full-time and cheap migrant labour pays to reproduce middle-class life. Where is the give?

This is, however where this programme comes in: social change does not come from nothing, and in my experience of it over the last 25 years, without a period of dedication, initiation, whatever you want to call it, ideas don't take hold and you don't gain the strength to even begin to assert a countervailing force to the status quo. And the status quo persists as crisis. We have no leaders, or as I prefer to call it, adults.  Because being an adult is not simply a matter of adjustment; in this context, it is the strength, creativity, the vision to resist.

So if this programme requires you to go against the grain, that is deliberate. It's also necessary. It's not the same as requiring 18 hours of reciting the rosary (though the principle of rejection has a family relationship). It's that 3 hours of reading gets you much further than one, and I really believe that it takes a certain intensity and breadth of study, simultaneously for a real research to begin, for pieces to fall into place. You either allow a social mission to burn through you or you don't. And there's no need for me to replay the narratives concerning the impacts of social media on democratic discourse and our social fabric frayed almost beyond use.

If you've got other priorities, that's cool, you may have a better idea to pilot or find a better deal or set-up. This has to light up something in you. It will sound complacent and smug to say it, but if it does fire you, you'll make money and time follow; this is quite far from asking the impossible. And frankly, the impossibility of continuing the way things are, navigating through the wreckage with barely an accomplice you can trust demands radical measures. Against a local backdrop of Starmers, Burnhams and Streetings, or Farages, or even Polanskis, the solution is to trust yourself and engage in processes wherein you can build trust with people you can get on a bike to see. This is just one way - through literature, collective analysis, public performance - as a strategy. Hopefully, it's for you. 

An additional point: the framing of this programme as a social good is real: critical thinkers and those who hone the art of social dialogue are needed, readers are more likely to be involved in their communities - my own politicisation was in the years of opposing tuition fees in defence of free education, that is education paid for by society as an overall social good. But, it's simpler, more specific, and more fundamental than that: to pursue your own questions, to move some mountains to do a thing you want to do - for your own authentic fulfilment - is to assert autonomy over life, not as a youtube or instagram hustle, but something radically influential.  

I'll write more about my organising, educational, and facilitation expience, and and particularly on the groupwork and what it might mean to be an educator in your field, but more important is to get on the streets where a dialogue can happen.