We need community more than ever–and Night School Bar is a community like none other! We bring curious people together to connect through study, art, and imagination–over great drinks!

Where else can you go to find free-wheeling conversations about the politics of fembots, the utopian horizons of intimacy, or the contemporary resonance of 19th century novels? Where can you write surrealist fiction alongside new friends, or analyze our political moment and imagine new futures together? More simply, where else can you meet other people who want to talk about what fascinates you in a casual, convivial bar environment? 

Since 2020, Night School Bar has been providing arts and humanities education to adult learners across the US and around the world. In 2023, we made a brick-and-mortar home in Durham, NC, adding in-person classes alongside our online offerings. We believe that everyone should have access to the things that make life meaningful–art, ideas, imagination, and community. For us, this means offering a scholarship to everyone who needs one. We are asking you to help fund these scholarships through the end of 2025.

Each year, we offer more than 80 classes, teach-ins, workshops, and seminars, both online and in-person. Whether at the bar in Durham, NC or online, you can find us studying together, making new friends with shared interests, and deepening our community connections. In the past year, we’ve offered film screening series, songwriting and visual art courses, as well as new classes in creative writing, literature, anthropology, political economy, environmental and medical humanities, feminist and anti-racist philosophy, and interdisciplinary studies. All of these classes have been offered on a sliding-scale basis. Our scholarship fund plays a critical role in accessibility, supplementing tuition for over 80% of students at Night School Bar, and enabling us to offer living-wage employment to our instructors.

Night School Bar’s scholarship model is unique, supporting an incredibly diverse student body. We recognize that scholarship programs that require individuals to document and meet specific metrics of need often miss a fuller picture of their economic reality, and thus act as barriers to entry. At Night School Bar, every student self-determines their own financial need; no gate-keeping, no questions asked. This creates adult classrooms that are diverse across age, race, gender, ethnicity, and class. Importantly, our classes are designed with a wide array of lived experiences in mind–and they are aimed at helping us make critical sense of our world, creating meaningful connections, and inspiring creativity. We are not a certificate- or degree-granting program, by choice. Instead, we believe that learning is a lifelong endeavor. This means that everyone who studies with Night School Bar is here because they want to generate new pathways to enrichment and fulfillment, find friends and expand their social worlds, and commit to a better collective future. 

Night School Bar does all this without an endowment. We receive about half of the funds we need for our educational program through direct student tuition. Crowdfunding is an important key to providing the other half. In the face of rampant inflation, where costs far out-pace wages for both students and instructors, we need your help more than ever. This is why we’re seeking Back-to-School scholarship funds!

In addition to this month-long fundraiser, we are looking for long-term donor-partners to make a multi-year commitment to ensure a sustainable future for Night School Bar. If you would like to make a multi-year gift, please email us at nightschoolbar@gmail.com to discuss!