Learn, build, and share—together.
Where people learn the tools changing work by using them on problems that matter here.
What upskilling means here
Take on something new and make it work. That is the skill every job now asks for, and the one The Labs practices.
The tools change with the problem. This cycle they are AI coding agents, Git and GitHub, reading data, and framing a problem before solving it. You use them on real work, with people watching and helping, and you leave able to pick up the next one on your own.
Our mission
The Upskilling Labs helps people take action together on the complex obstacles to their flourishing, and become the kind of community that can.
In Greater Washington that means a region that runs itself: sessions and Cycles on the calendar every season, run by people who started where you are, paid for close to home. Then we write down how we did it, so the next region starts from our notes.
How it works
Sessions and project nights in the libraries you already use.
Pods research a real problem; projects build what they find, in the open.
Teach it to your team, then to the next person, then put it in the commons.
Our theory of change
From the outside, The Labs looks like a place where people learn by building things together. Underneath is a loop. Each turn of Learn, Build, Share leaves the person, the neighborhood and the network with more than they started with, and each one’s gain is the next one’s starting point.
You
Come with a problem. Build in a Cycle. Earn standing by contributing. Teach the next session.
What grows: Capability, standing, voice
Your neighborhood
Neighbors make the tools for their own problems, in the library they already use, and own what they make.
What grows: The value stays where it was made
The network
Regions share one open method and one open platform, so what works here can work anywhere.
What grows: Evidence, adoption, and investment that flows back down
The direction is the point. For a century, know-how was made somewhere else and delivered to neighborhoods. Here it is made where it is used, by the people who use it, and passed on once it works.
The loop draws on the Community Capitals Framework (Flora and Flora): investing in one kind of capital, like skills, grows the others, like ties, voice and investment.
Where this started
The Labs began at DC Public Library in 2025, when a library coordinator brought a problem situation to two designers: experienced people out of work, employers asking for new skills, and one-off classes with nothing after. When the first pilot ended, people kept meeting. Greater Washington is where that happened, and now the region is organizing itself.
Greater Washington is three jurisdictions, one labor market and one identity: DC, Maryland and Virginia, inside the Beltway and out. Labs start the same way wherever they are: in a branch library.
How we’re organized
The Upskilling Labs, Inc. runs the region today, including this site. A steering committee of members leads the region’s self-organization, working toward a chartered regional organization of The Labs. The national nonprofit keeps the method, the shared platform and the charter; the region runs the Cycle, the sessions and its own volunteers.
What this site is
The region’s own copy of OLOS, the open-source platform The Labs runs on, built while we use it during the current Build Cycle. What works here goes back to the shared platform. See the code.