Free training, run by the Foundation, built so that cost and equipment are never the reason somebody does not learn a trade. Every program is written out in full before it is taught — the whole curriculum is on this site, open, for anybody to read or teach from.
Audio, video and lighting — the trade that travels with you. The audio tier, Front of House, is written out module by module: signal flow, cable, microphones, the console, EQ and feedback, monitors, the mix, and load-in to load-out. It ends with a real show in a real room.
37 of 51 lessons need no equipment at all
Open Fill The Room →If you want to learn this
No application, no audition, no deadline and no experience. 37 of the 51 Front of House lessons need no equipment at all — you can work through them on a phone, on a school laptop or at a kitchen table, at your own pace, and stop whenever you want.
You do not have to want a career in it. Plenty of people learn this to run sound at their own church, their own school or their own band, and that is a complete reason to take it.
What a student becomes
Nobody needs us to place them afterward. There is a church down the road running a service on a system nobody was ever trained on. There is a band three months old that has never had anyone on the board. There is a school with a stage and a cabinet of equipment nobody opens. Those rooms are everywhere, and every one of them is short the same person.
So the two asks on this page feed each other. Somebody who already runs sound gives a few hours, and a student gets through the hands-on end of the course. That student walks into a room that has never had a sound person and becomes one — and then they are the one standing behind the next student.
Each one opens the door for the other. That is why both asks are here, and why the whole curriculum is published in the open for anybody to take and teach.
How these are built
Each program is published as a complete curriculum: every module, every lesson, the instructor notes, the slide order and the extra credit. Nothing is improvised in the room, and nobody has to have been there to teach it.
That is deliberate. A program that only one person can run is not a program, it is a favor — and it ends the moment that person is unavailable. Writing it down is what lets a teacher or a volunteer pick it up and run it as written.
If you can already do this work
A school can adopt this program and run it as a class. A church can run it on its own sound team, a club on its own stage, a band between rehearsals. The whole curriculum is published here for any of them to take and teach.
Every one of those rooms is better with somebody in it who already does the work — in a school period, at a Sunday service, on a weekend, or at a show. Whatever hours you have are the right hours.
If you run sound, video or lighting and can stand behind a student for a few of them, that is the single most useful thing anybody can give this program. Write to give@cultivationfoundation.org.