The Fellowship
It turns "find and train a local" into something you can actually repeat. Here's how it runs.
Format & structure
It's unpaid on both sides. You're not paid and you don't pay. What you get instead is the training and a real role in something that's growing. The cohort is multi-city, and the group chat that runs it ends up being how the cities stay in touch later on.
- Weekly sessions — the shared curriculum below.
- Homework you actually do — between sessions: run an outreach experiment, host a practice conversation.
- Optional 1:1 coaching — opt in if you want it.
- A cohort group chat — the backchannel, and later the thing that links the cities.
- Public reports — you post your progress where the cohort can see it, so it's a real class with a body of work, not everyone quietly reporting to the centre.
Shared curriculum
Both roles train on the same four things.
- Social skills Starting a conversation with a stranger, reading a room, making someone feel like they belong there. The stuff people call a gift, taught as a skill you can learn.
- Community building The weekly, social-first model, and why low-commitment-high-reward is the thing that makes it stick. How a first-timer turns into a regular.
- The topics Enough of a handle on AI safety, rationalism, and the ideas around them to keep a smart room talking and point the curious somewhere real. You're holding the conversation, not lecturing it.
- The City Aligned model The format, the seed-and-handoff playbook, and how one table fits the rest.
The two roles
Recruiting is the core track, the harder and more skill-dense of the two, and the one that really shows whether you've got it. Hosting is a shorter capstone you can add once you're in. Aim for one of each per city. Early on they can be the same person, and as a table matures they split, with the host often promoted from a regular the recruiter brought in.
Recruiter
Fill the room with the right people, and work out who the right people are.
The real skill is judgment in a live social setting. Copy and outreach are just tools for it. You go to events and bring the interesting people back, invite friends and friends-of-friends who fit, reach into your university and workplace, and slowly work out the filter for who to chase and who to let drift. You also scout the next people, the future hosts and fellows hiding among the regulars, and you weight the funnel toward women so it doesn't just rebuild the imbalance.
Host
Hold the room. Make the weekly happen, and feel good.
This one is deliberately light, more about turning up than producing anything. Show up every week, explain what City Aligned is, keep the conversation warm and moving, make a newcomer feel welcome. Bring the marker so people can find the table. The Luma post is handled for you at first so it's never intimidating, and you can take it on later if you want.
The recursion
A good recruiter ends up producing the pool the next host comes from, and the host they promote starts scouting in turn. It's seed-and-handoff applied to the people, not just the cities. Each table, run well, grows whoever runs the next one.
Express interest