What is a Junto?

The original Junto

In the autumn of 1727, Benjamin Franklin — then twenty-one and running a small print shop — gathered eleven other tradesmen and artisans into a club that met every Friday evening. A glazier, a surveyor, a cabinetmaker, a clerk, a shoemaker. Not gentlemen; working people.

They called it the Junto, from the Spanish "junta" — a group joined together. Members later nicknamed it the Leather Apron Club, after the aprons the tradesmen wore. It ran, in one form or another, for about forty years.

The rules were simple and unusual. Every member had to produce a question on morals, politics or natural philosophy for the group to discuss, and every three months, write and read an essay of their own. Debate was conducted "in the sincere spirit of enquiry after truth, without fondness for dispute or desire of victory" — arguing to win was, literally, fineable.

What twelve tradesmen actually built

The Junto was not a debating society that produced only conversation. Its members pooled what they had and built institutions that outlasted all of them.

They put their books in one room so everyone could use them, which became the Library Company of Philadelphia — the first subscription library in America, and the ancestor of the public library. They founded the Union Fire Company, the first volunteer fire brigade in the city. They started an insurance company. They founded an academy that became the University of Pennsylvania, and a hospital that is still open.

None of that came from capital. It came from a small group of people with different skills, meeting regularly, and agreeing to advance each other's interests as well as their own.

Why we took the name

The Junto is the oldest good answer to the question this product exists for: what do you do when you have ambition, a trade, and no money?

Franklin's answer was to find eleven other people in the same position, meet every week, and be deliberate about helping each other build things. The membership questions were startlingly practical — one of them was, in effect, "do you know of a worthy stranger newly arrived in town whom we can help?" and another was "in what manner can the Junto, or any of them, assist you in any of your honourable designs?"

That is the sentence this platform is trying to be. A project posted here is someone asking the Junto for help with an honourable design, and the roles on it say exactly what help is needed and what it is worth.

The mark

The Junto logo is a ring with one gap in it, and a filled dot arriving at the gap.

The ring is the table. The gap is the open role. The dot is the person taking it. It is the same idea Franklin had, drawn in two shapes: a circle of people, and room for one more.