Trade School, New York to Everywhere

In 2009, a small group of people who ran a skills-sharing website called OurGoods — Rich Watts, Louise Ma, and Caroline Woolard — were given the opportunity to use a vacant shop on New York's Lower East Side. They had no budget and no institutional backing. What they had was an idea: a school where anyone could teach, and the price of attendance was a barter item the teacher requested. For just over a month, over 800 people participated in more than 70 classes. The barter items were playful and intimate — jars, music tips, vegetables, help finding an apartment. The classes ranged from sewing to sign language to web design. The only qualification for teaching was passion and knowledge. No credentials required.

What Trade School surfaced was a hunger not just for learning but for exchange that felt human. As co-founder Caroline Woolard observed, the expansion of Trade School chapters around the world may have been driven by the feeling that some things just don't work in a market economy — that people have a fundamental need for creativity, connection, and the dignity of having something to offer. The organizers insisted on horizontal governance: every Trade School chapter operated as a collective or cooperative. Trade School grew from one vacant storefront into a global network that ran for a decade, from 2009 to 2019. Chapters sprouted across the US, Canada, and beyond. They published a book documenting the project. And then they stopped.

The decision to end was as intentional as the decision to begin — a recognition that the form had run its course, and that clinging to an institution can become its own kind of extraction. What Trade School left behind is a model: that learning happens best in relationship, that everyone is an expert in something, and that the barter — the act of bringing something you have to offer — transforms a student into a participant.