Resilience officers and analysts have been known to call resilience a latent feature of a community: until a disaster strikes, it’s difficult to measure, assess, or improve.

We know better.

If you’d like to see how your community will fare during a disaster in the future, visit its venues and festivals today.

The ReadyWhen Foundations Certificate in Event & Emergency Operations repositions cultural venues and event organizations from entities needing protection to community resilience assets with documented emergency response capabilities. Whether you operate a museum, library, music venue, historic site, or produce festivals, this credential transforms how emergency managers, funders, and municipal partners perceive your organization—opening pathways to service contracts, climate resilience funding, and emergency preparedness partnerships while strengthening what you already do well.

Events and public programs function as controlled emergencies, using identical operational systems as disaster response: crowd management, logistics coordination, communication under pressure, resource deployment. This 10-hour certificate coupled with on-demand online coursework transforms existing expertise into documented emergency response capacity while cultivating habits of mind essential for situational leadership and partnership building.

Certificate holders gain verifiable competencies that create common language within organizations and between arts and emergency management sectors—showing how your specific expertise advances community resilience.

In April 2026, earn your certificate in a weekend intensive at the International Foundation for Cultural Property Protection’s 27th Annual Conference in New Orleans!

The weekend kicks off on Saturday, April 18th with an immersive practicum through the renowned French Quarter Festival. Experience operations firsthand through a 3-4 hour guided tour of the festival infrastructure, featuring interviews with professionals and interactive learning activities. We’ll take a look at critical waste, water, and power systems, evaluating the site through the lenses of the four pillars of resilience, all while enjoying the culture, music, and food of this beloved annual event. A full-day pre-conference on Sunday, April 19th will flesh out the classroom training component and collaborative hands-on scenario activities required for the certification.

Designed for cultural venue professionals preparing for climate and disaster impacts, all activities have a strong throughline from daily operations to community resilience. Built around the realities of museums, libraries, historic sites, and cultural centers, the program uses live event observation and practical classroom work to help participants see how their existing strengths in crowd experience, building stewardship, accessibility, and mission-driven programming can support communities when conditions change.

This isn’t your typical safety certification. Every skill and scenario is assessed through four interconnected pillars: safety, accessibility, sustainability, and community engagement. This mirrors how actual operations work—where accessibility decisions affect evacuation routes, waste systems inform resource continuity, and community trust determines what you’re capable of mobilizing, whether activating volunteer networks, partnering with neighboring organizations, or cultivating relationships with local emergency management and public safety professionals.

The curriculum values what makes gatherings beloved: the embedded memory of place, the volunteer networks built over decades, the cultural infrastructure that transcends perfect facilities. Participants learn to recognize threshold moments when routine operations shift toward incident response, practicing decision-making through immersive scenarios grounded in real cultural properties.