Start a Public Sphere Salon

Join the Salonnière Family

 

The Benefits of Starting a Salon

Starting your own salon is a very meaningful, rewarding and empowering experience. As a salonnière you have the honourable role of creating community by bringing people together to discuss ideas and advance culture. You offer an important opportunity for informal education, advance structures of participatory democracy, and contribute to a more informed citizen body by exploring a range of different topics of relevance in the 21st century.

By establishing an intellectually stimulating and egalitarian spaces for discourse, you promote values of rationality, equality, and fraternity, realize a distinct social good and are at the forefront of important issues shaping society and politics.

Salons are also a wonderful way to meet interesting people with diverse backgrounds and fresh perspectives, forging lifelong friendships, meaningful connections, and sometimes even great love affairs! Salons entertain, delight the senses and intellect and bring joy to the lives of others, making life more beautiful and enriching in the process.

Why Public Sphere Salons?

By starting a Public Sphere salon, you have the autonomy to create a salon in your city or neighborhood that is uniquely yours, but with the support of an umbrella organization that connects you to a global network of salonnières, and provides you with the intellectual resources, material, and people to make your salon a success and part of a larger movement.

Being a Public Sphere salonnière enables you to:

  • Gain access to our complimentary salonnière training days to learn the skills of a salonnière and connect with salonnières around the world.
  • Gain access to our global network of salonnières, dedicated salon attendees, musicians, artists, academics, specialist speakers, and Public Sphere fellows
  • Enjoy the prestige of The Public Sphere to attract fascinating speakers and host wonderful events
  • Use the Public Sphere logo on your “conversation menu” & invitations
  • Publicise your salon to our global network on our website and social media
  • Make use of helpful templates such as “conversation menus” and sample letters to speakers to reduce your workload
  • Make use of our support system and receive guidance from the The Public Sphere team
  • Include The Public Sphere in your cv, linkedin…
  • Join an important global movement to revive the art of conversation and community through ideas

Who Can Run a Salon? 

There is a common misconception that if you are not a philosopher or intellectual you cannot run a salon. But in truth anyone can run a salon. All it takes is dedication, a willingness to experiment and learn, and a passion for ideas and bringing people together. As a salonnière you do not have to have expert knowledge on all or any subjects. Your role is to facilitate, not dominate, conversation. The key is to develop skill sets of listening, moderating, making people feel comfortable and welcome and fostering a positive environment for discourse. These skills can be learned through practice.

The one essential prerequisite is that you are committed to hosting regular salons, once a month or every other month. When you create a salon it quickly becomes an important community and people depend on you to sustain it. It is a great disappointment if salons do not occur regularly or are not pursued with care and commitment. A mediocre salon produces mediocre results but a salon created with great thought and dedication offers innumerable benefits to you and your guests. Running an excellent salon is entirely feasible as it is a low time commitment, essentially the same as hosting a dinner party once a month.We recommend that you start a salon if you are committed to the ethos behind them and are likely to live in the same city for at least two years, so that you can form and sustain a community.

Salonnière Application Form 

If you are interested in starting a salon please fill out the application form below. Once you submit the form we will get back to you shortly. If you have any questions at any point please do not hesitate to contact us. contact@publicspheresalons.com