Cohort 2 is in session.The next cohort opens to the waitlist first.

Cohort 2 ran at $447, or two payments of $229. Dates and early bird pricing for the next cohort go to the waitlist first.

For context. A professional credential in the events industry runs roughly $875 in application and exam fees, before the 15 to 25 hours of continuing education required to sit for it. Four-hour certificate courses from the major meeting associations run $305 to $355. A week at a residential management school runs into the thousands, before you have booked a single flight.

Association dues buy you access. A conference buys you a hallway conversation. A credential buys you letters after your name. None of them develop the leader.

A certification teaches you the work and tests whether you learned it. This develops the person doing the work. Festival Leadership Foundations is built on the Three Depths Framework™ and uses your CliftonStrengths® results as the foundation, so you are not learning someone else's leadership style. You are learning to lead from the way you are actually wired.

Both have a place. Most festival and live events professionals already have the operational training. What almost none of them were ever given is this.

Never. The course runs online and the live sessions happen on Zoom.

No flight. No hotel. No four days away from your site. No missing the meeting where the real decisions get made. It works on your laptop, your phone, or your tablet, so you can do it between load-in and doors, at 5am before the site wakes up, or in the seat on the way to the next one.

Festival directors and coordinating producers, yes. But also producers, talent buyers, production managers, stage managers, site and operations directors, marketers, sponsor representatives, venue operators, tour managers, artist managers, hotel and convention services leads, catering and food-and-beverage managers, conference producers, cultural institution program staff, and volunteer coordinators fifteen seasons deep.

And if you are standing in the dirt of your very first festival this year with a radio that will not stop, wondering whether you are in over your head, this was built for you too.

The modules are self-paced, so you move at the speed your season allows. The three live sessions are the part worth protecting on your calendar.

Each one runs about an hour. Thirty minutes of teaching, then thirty minutes of open room. The teaching half is recorded and posted to the portal. The room is not. That is deliberate. People say different things when they know it is being published, and the honest conversation is the part you came for.

It probably will. That is the industry. The modules do not expire and your seat does not close, so the work waits for you and picks back up when your site does. And every cohort after this one is open to you at no additional cost -- not a limited-time bonus, a standing invitation. If this season swallows you whole, you come back through with the next room.

You keep your seat. Everyone who enrolls is invited back to the live sessions for every future cohort, and keeps access to the Festival Resource Vault as it grows. You are not buying a course that ends. You are joining a room that keeps meeting.

Yes. Cohort 2 offered two payments of $229, and a payment plan is part of every cohort. Seasonal and contract income is the reality in this industry, not the exception.