Dialogue:
The English Language School
of the People

Free

A letter from the founder

Dear visitor,

I want to tell you the truth about what free means at Dialogue.

Free does not mean costless. Every "free" thing on this page has a real cost, and someone is really paying it. Students at Dialogue pay nothing. But teachers are paid. The Executive Director is paid. The platforms have costs. The IRS filings have costs. Every one of those costs is met: initially by me the founder, next by other donors with me, by foundations, by partner organizations who have chosen to make this work possible.

You're reading this page because sometimes "free" claims in education are not honest, and this one needs to be open, clear, sincere, accountable, and as transparent as possible. We all know when an institution will hide costs, defer them, or shift them onto students later in the form of fees, deposits, materials, technology requirements, or visa-related expenses.

Free at Dialogue means free for the student; and it also means genuinely honest about who pays for what, why, and how.

Students deserve to know who their benefactors are. Benefactors deserve to know they are benefactors, including the ones who do not yet know that a Dialogue learner in Bandung, Bogotá, or Brooklyn is using their generosity tonight.

We at Dialogue treat English not as a "foreign" language to be mastered, and not as a market commodity to be sold. We treat it as a graft, to use a metaphor that Jhumpa Lahiri uses for her adult language learned, a branch grown into her full linguistic repertoire tree, a way each of us grows a new variety of ourselves without erasing our original roots. The donor-funded human teacher in the teleclassroom, and the teleclassmates, and anybody else whom the learner is learning from, are the ones who help to make the graft take. Since English is the world's lingua franca, that's quite a big tree of people!

Dialogue is a practice of mutual freedom. We do not charge for what we already own together.

— Kurk Gayle, Ph.D., Founder

What's free, who pays, why, and how

Infrastructure benefactors

The organizations whose free services let Dialogue operate as a school.

Google. Workspace for Nonprofits: Gmail, Drive, Meet, Classroom, Sites (this website), Docs, Forms, Gemini, NotebookLM. Free because Google subsidizes verified 501(c)(3)s.

Thread Bank, via Relay Financial. Business banking with no fees, no minimums, FDIC-insured to $3M. Thread Bank earns from deposits and other customers and chose to make nonprofit banking free.

Zeffy. Donation processing, $0 fees on every gift. 100% of what you give to Dialogue reaches Dialogue. How Zeffy stays free: at checkout, donors see a suggested optional contribution to Zeffy itself, often pre-filled around 15%. You can change it to any amount, including zero, in one click. Whatever you choose, your gift to Dialogue is unaffected.

Otter.ai. Free-tier transcription, supported by Otter's paying subscribers.

LinkedIn. Free professional and organization pages, supported by LinkedIn's premium and recruiter business.

TechSoup, Goodstack, Candid, SAM.gov, Grants.gov, IRS Tax Exempt Organization Search. Nonprofit verification, public-profile, and federal grant infrastructure. Built and maintained for organizations exactly like Dialogue.

AI tool benefactors

Free AI tools that, as recently as 2022, did not exist.

Anthropic (Claude), OpenAI (ChatGPT), Google (Gemini, NotebookLM), Curipod, MagicSchool, Skill Struck. Each provides free or nonprofit-tier access that Dialogue uses for instructional preparation, learner self-pacing, and TOEML™ assessment infrastructure.

Pedagogical and Educational and other Aspirational partners (in development)

Dialogue's pedagogical and educational partnerships are being formalized one institution at a time. The list below names institutions whose tuition-free missions or English-pathway structures align naturally with Dialogue's model. Inclusion here does not yet imply any conversation yet or any formal agreement of any sort, just admiration for their mission and good work and aspiration for working alongside each.

Tuition-free institutions: Berea College, Cal Poly Humboldt, College of the Ozarks, Curtis Institute of Music, Deep Springs College, University of the People.

DFW-area institutions for conditional-admission pathways: Tarrant County College, Texas Christian University, University of Texas at Arlington, University of North Texas, Texas Woman's University, Dallas Baptist University, Texas Wesleyan University, Southern Methodist University, University of Texas at Dallas, Dallas College.

Aspirational partners: refugee resettlement agencies, immigrant service organizations, community colleges, and faith communities. Named here as partnerships are formalized.

Funding partners

Dialogue's Year 1 operating budget is $206,810. That budget pays full compensation to one founding Instructor at $100,000 and one Executive Director at $80,000, plus retirement, health insurance, and payroll taxes.

Foundation grants and named individual donors will be listed here, with their permission, beginning after the June 1, 2026 board meeting.

The economics of free

The Year 1 ask is $206,810. Donations are processed at $0 fee through Zeffy and held at Thread Bank via Relay Financial.

Over the longer horizon, Dialogue is also building a $3.5 million endowment, a permanent financial reserve whose investment returns generate operating revenue year after year, protecting the school's ability to stay free regardless of any single funder's priorities. The endowment is the insurance policy that protects the work in the decades to come. Ten percent of every operational donation is automatically directed to the endowment.

The endowment exists specifically so that no future donor or government can use financial leverage to change what we teach or how we govern.

Why this accounting matters

Most "free" claims in education are not honest. Dialogue's are. Students deserve to know who their benefactors are. Benefactors deserve to know they are benefactors. Transparency to students is transparency to donors and partners alike.

Dialogue is a practice of mutual freedom. We do not charge for what we already own together.

Dialogue: The English Language School of the People is the first and only nonprofit to remove the barriers of tuition and location for learners desiring live human, high quality, immersive study of the world's lingua franca.

Dialogue admits students of any language, "native speaker" status, race, color, national origin, ethnic origin, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, disability, or immigration status to all the rights, privileges, programs, and activities generally accorded or made available to students at the school. It does not discriminate on the basis of any of these characteristics in administration of its educational policies, admissions policies, and other school-administered programs. Its guiding force is what we call "learnerocracy," the power of the people of the school to govern their own learning and this organization as their own.

Dialogue (EIN: 41-2923319) is the US IRS registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that owns and operates dialogueschool.org.

Launching September 2026