We are the festival directors, promoters, producers, and department heads committed to integrating social equity into our festivals – throughout our grounds, behind our stages, in our offices, and in our lives.
Building upon our pledge to advance social equity in the festival industry, we are launching a mentorship program to support the missions of founding impact partners Diversify The Stage, Well Dunn Foundation, shesaid.so, and more.
This program aims to addresses two inequities in our industry:
1. Diversifying festival leadership to include wider pools of talent.
2. Closing the education gap by demystifying festival production and management.
We will announce the 14 future festival leaders who are joining as mentees and 14 current festival leaders who will serve as mentors in January 2023.
In 2021, over 20 leaders from 10 festivals joined forces to launch the Coalition of Festivals under two pillars:
We launched Program 1: Be The Change in partnership with SHIFT, who led a series of diversity, inclusion, equity, and justice training sessions paired with Coalition-led closed-door discussions for festival leaders to to examine how implicit, explicit, and structural problems show up in our festivals.
This is our opportunity to unite, center community over competition, and rebuild a stronger festival industry together. Join us.
