The Festival Academy believes festivals are bridging platforms with a direct link to people and civil society structures. We believe a critical reflection between artists, arts and cultural managers worldwide and cross-sectoral stakeholders can bring about positive change, informed awareness, ideas and proposals for actions through personal human relations and based on knowing, respecting and tolerating different value and belief systems. We are a global community of today 737 festival managers from 100+ countries. We offer various training formats and peer to peer exchange on festival management to emerging, dynamic and passionate festival makers worldwide coming from all art disciplines and from very diverse geographical, cultural and social backgrounds. There are numerous leadership and capacity building programmes but few starting from the artistic focus of a festival, and with a global dimension and vision of this project, and more especially, the cultural dimension of the challenges facing the world. The project continues building and empowering a global network of festival managers and a conversation which does not stay amongst ourselves but between and beyond the world of festivals and different fields of action. It generates awareness about festivals and their role in society today, their capacity to be vehicles for social change, social cohesion, strengthening human rights values and global diversity, with the aim to create a more open and tolerant society.