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# Run A 101!
- URL: https://futuri.city/run-a-101/
- Published: 2026-02-13T18:09:41.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-19T19:32:45.000Z
- Description: May the revolution make teachers and students of us all
- Author: Sophia McAllister
- Tags: Newsletter, #sophiefrommars, #Migrated-1792438291474, #Import 2026-10-19 20:32

Since I got a telescope last year I've been making trips to darker spots within and around London, usually the local park, in order to do [astrophotography](https://www.tumblr.com/sophie-frm-mars/808452159883689984/reminder-that-you-can-see-my-astrophotography-on?ref=futuri.city) (Yes I do know it's rained every day so far this year in Britain, yes I am going insane). As I've learned how to use the telescope better to see more and capture more in pictures, I've also had more friends come along as well as strangers who wandered up to our group out of curiosity. The more times you teach different people to use a telescope, the more the information finds a natural emergent flow. You know which questions people are likely to ask and when. You didn't set out to make a lesson plan per se, but you start to have a loose script nonetheless.

I bring this up because I think there is a certain aura we project onto our teachers or onto the act of teaching that we sometimes don't fully lose until we teach others. Certainly state approved curricula have a much higher level of standardization and regulation than the things we teach our friends, and the act of sitting down to intentionally plan a lesson is more intentional work, but teaching can take many different forms.

Part of my job as a public figure has been as a teacher, in that people come to my writing often to learn. I have also been teaching in an organising capacity.

Here I am going to talk more about lessons with a teacher and a class and a lesson plan and a run time, but it is the concept of teaching that I am trying to promote - specifically the model we call upskilling or skill sharing in an organising context. Recently I've done a bit of writing on [organising with very specific direct suggestions](https://open.substack.com/pub/sophiefrommars/p/trans-organising-the-assembly-model?utm%5Fsource=share&utm%5Fmedium=android&r=3si34j). While I'm not trying to build a holistic model of absolutely all the organising that I think should happen, it hit me today how important upskilling is and how absent it is from my other writing.

In one community that I organise in, “running a 101” has become a very common bit of vocabulary. This is because our org has a basic curriculum (101 sessions) for new volunteers as well as optional classes (usually described as 201s because they're for more “advanced” topics) for people who want to specifically learn about something not covered in the original sessions. The concept of “a 101” (or a 201) is very useful to the organising context because it allows us to directly tackle issues of low capacity. When there are skills that people need in order to put in hours to help the goals of the org, it can happen faster with more people.

Being in communities where people share a basic confidence that they can do a lot of the same things or can quickly learn to do things they can't is wonderful and it's a little hard to enumerate the benefits. I'll try anyway.

1. **It is the natural solution to skill bottlenecks**. Often in a group one person is the only person who can do something, and therefore it only gets done by them, often slowly and with some attached stress. If that person teaches others to do it, the org is more capable.
2. **It's just very human**. As a collective we are constantly teaching ourselves, and the kind of variety that we get in learning to do more different things is what our big adaptable brains love, actually. Big win for neuron activation.
3. **It doesn't diminish anyone's expertise or strengths**. I hope we've all read [the tyranny of structurelessness](https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm?ref=futuri.city). It's okay if someone is really good at comms and is going to be the comms officer of an org because they have a talent for it. It's not okay if nobody can send an external email when that person is sick.
4. **Scalability (fractal growth time, baybee!)** An org that can train people is immediately offering knowledge and skills to people, which is appealing at the outset, plus in a culture of upskilling you can train more people to be trainers, and more people broadly feel confident to take on responsibilities like teaching. This means the org can generate more competent members proportional to how many members it already has.

Obviously some things do require intensive or long term training. Nobody is going to become a world class server admin for a fully encrypted private org network overnight, for example. These are still ultimately vulnerabilities. If you haven't heard of the bus factor, it's a popular term in the tech sector (and probably others but I know it from programming) for the number of people who would have to get hit by a bus for your team to be unable to function. There are a lot of orgs with a single digit bus factor who could be in a much more stable position, and I would argue *should* be. Compared to an office worker who might get hit by a bus, we have to remember that activists may be physically incapacitated, but also may be arrested, may experience life complications in a way that eats into volunteer time in a way it wouldn't into work, or as we're all constantly highlighting: may simply burn out. Burnout happens most often when an org has a bus factor of 1, and because that one person has not been able to successfully delegate. It is not the things that only this person can do that are the reason for their burnout but the things that they are doing that other people could be doing instead. If we want to protect against burnout those things must be delegated, and in many cases that means thinking ahead and sharing skills. As for specialist skills, it is still better in the long term if there are more people who can do the highly technical skills that take a long time to learn.

Nurturing a culture of upskilling is vital to decentralized (or “polycephalous” or “leaderful”) organising. In order to maximally benefit from everyone's abilities, a group should train everyone in it to be basically competent at the things that everyone needs to do. In every example of successful polycephalous organising I see, experience, hear or read about, people teach each other how to do things and this makes the collective significantly stronger.

It also feels worth mentioning reading groups here, but I would say that. I am a bookish anarchist and reading groups are what we consume to stay warm through the winter. For the practical side of theoretical knowledge sharing, which is more obscure than that of skill sharing, the more politically educated people in an org become, the more informed they feel taking part in its democratic structure.

To make your org healthier and stronger, don't be the only one who can do that thing. Teach others to do it and share the responsibility for it. Run a 101!