Bluestockings Fellowship
A free fellowship that teaches people to start and run City Aligned tables. Woman-prioritized, open to all.
How it works Express interestThe Bluestockings Fellowship finds people who want to learn community building and teaches them how, so a new city doesn't have to wait on us to show up.
City Aligned grows by starting a weekly table in a new city, finding a local to run it, then handing it over. The hard part was always that middle step, finding and training the local. Bluestockings is the part that makes it repeatable. It's a cohort you go through, with weekly sessions, homework you actually do, and a group chat. You're not paid and you don't pay. What you get instead is real training and a genuine role in something that's getting built.
The rooms need more women building them
The meetups this feeds are badly gender-skewed. It's pretty common to walk into one of these rooms and count a single woman. That's the honest reason Bluestockings is woman-prioritized. Not as a gesture, but because the funnel just reproduces the imbalance unless someone actively corrects it.
It's open to all, because what we're really selecting for is temperament rather than gender: people who are curious and warm and actually want to learn this. And it's run as what it is, a real fellowship with a syllabus, weekly sessions, homework, and work you do in public, not a casual invite.
Where "Bluestockings" comes from
In 1750s London, your standing at a party came down to your silk stockings and how well you played the room. The Bluestockings dropped all of that. The story goes that a clever, unfashionable man turned up in plain blue wool stockings instead of the formal black silk everyone expected, and the hostess told him to come as he was, because they wanted his mind, not his outfit. The women took the joke and kept it. Being a Bluestocking meant you'd rather be interesting than decorative, and that you'd build the room where that was allowed.
Later the word got turned into an insult, a way to mock a woman for being too clever to be likeable. Which mostly measures how much ground they'd already won, because you don't bother inventing the slur otherwise. The idea goes back further still, to the salonnières who ran Enlightenment Paris out of their drawing rooms. Which feels about right, since this all started with people meeting up in Paris too.
Two roles
Most people train on recruiting. Hosting is a shorter thing you can add once you're in.
Recruiter
Fill the room with the right people, and work out who the right people are. It's the harder of the two and mostly in person: reading whether a stranger's a fit, building a way to keep meeting them, figuring out the filter for your own city. You learn it here. You don't need to arrive knowing it.
Host
Hold the room. Show up every week, keep the conversation going, make sure a newcomer feels like they can just sit down. It's deliberately light, you can pick it up in a session, and it often goes to a regular the recruiter brought in.
People who want to learn to do it
Early-career and college-age people who want to build this skill, not people who already have it. You don't need to have organised anything before. If you're curious about other people and what they're working on, drawn to the idea of running a room like this, and up for growing into the nerve it takes, that's the person this is for. Learning it is the whole point.
Erin Saint Gull
I started Bluestockings because learning social skills changed how I move through the world, and the thing it changed most was how easily I could get people who should know each other into the same room. I've spent years building communities one way or another. My background is actually in education, which is more or less what this is, teaching a craft I care about to people who want to learn it.
Be in the first cohort
There isn't a cohort yet, I'm still putting the first one together. If you want to be in it, or help build it, tell me a bit about yourself.
Express interest