Join · 05 of 06 · participant academy
Five short courses for everyone who works this festival — communities, vendors, volunteers, performers, sellers, us. Ontario law writes two of them. Our insurance writes a third. The other two exist because a first pavilion and a first shopfront are hard for the same reasons every time.
Courses open winter 2027 · our plan for 7–8 August 2027 at LeBreton Flats, subject to permits
Every course on this page is described before it exists, in public, so that the shape of it is fixed in advance and the day it opens can be measured against what was promised. Where the content, the length or the check at the end is still open, the line says which.
Status · 28 August 2026 · rewritten the day a line changes
| Item | Where it stands |
|---|---|
| The five courses | Written now, against the regulation or the policy condition each one answers to |
| Courses open | Winter 2027, in the same wave as vendor, volunteer and performer applications |
| The marketplace course | Spring 2027, with the shopfronts |
| What a course costs | Nothing to anyone with a role · a food handler certificate comes from an outside provider at their fee |
| Who has no choice | Event accessibility is Ontario law for employees and volunteers alike, us included |
| Course lengths | Open · the figures on this page are the ceilings we are writing to |
| French | In preparation · the waiting list votes on how fast the mirror gets built |
| The waiting list | Open today · it sets the order the courses get written in |
A festival with pavilions cooking, vendors trading and several hundred volunteers moving through a public park runs on people knowing things. Some of that knowledge is required by law, in writing, with a regulator behind it. Some of it is required by the company that insures us. The rest is the difference between a first pavilion that enjoys its weekend and one that spends the weekend firefighting.
So the academy is short courses, online, free, sat once and recorded permanently. You take the ones your role needs. Your account shows what is outstanding and what is done, and the badge that gets you through the service gate on the Saturday morning is issued off that record.
Each one answers to something concrete — a regulation, a policy condition, or twenty emails that arrive every year asking the same thing. Read them as the syllabus we are writing to.
Planned · opening winter 2027
Course 01 and course 02 carry legal weight · course 03 is a condition of our cover
Lengths are the ceilings we are writing to. A course is finished when it teaches the thing, and the real length gets published the week it opens.
Proposed · winter 2027
| Course | Who it is for | Planned length |
|---|---|---|
| Event accessibility | Everyone with a role — crews, vendors, volunteers, performers, our own team | Under 40 minutes, online |
| Handling food on a field | Anyone working a food point in a pavilion or a vendor pitch | About an hour, plus your own certification elsewhere |
| Safety on the ground | Everyone on site during build, show days and strike | About 30 minutes, plus a walk of the site on build day |
| How a pavilion actually works | Pavilion coordinators and their deputies, one per community minimum | Two sittings, with a workbook you fill in for your own pavilion |
| Selling on the marketplace | Sellers listing goods or services | Under 30 minutes, online |
Every course ends the same way: a pass, dated, recorded in your account and kept there for the next edition and the one after that. Four of them leave something else behind as well. The food course holds your food handler certificate beside the pass. The safety course is the one a badge cannot be issued without. The pavilion course hands you a filled-in plan for your own pavilion. The marketplace course opens your shopfront.
A badge is issued on two things. Training passed, documents filed. That is the whole gate.
One account per person, opened when an application is accepted. It holds the courses your role needs, the documents your role needs, and the badge request. Six steps, in order, none of them optional.
Account opens winter 2027
Every box on this strip: planned
A role is assigned on an accepted application rather than by signing yourself up, so the courses you see are the ones you actually need. Pass one and the record is permanent — it stays in your account for the next edition, and for the edition after that.
Ontario asks organisations of fifty employees or more to keep a training log. We keep one from the first day, at any size, because the same log is what a funder, an insurer and a City officer each ask to see, and assembling it afterwards from memory is how organisations fail that question.
Dates that belong to a regulator are firm. Dates that belong to us are our plan, and every one of them depends on the site application landing.
All 2027 entries planned
Seven that arrive most often. Anything missing goes in the waiting list form below and gets answered there.
Answers change · the date on each change is published
The courses open in winter 2027, alongside the vendor, volunteer and performer applications. Writing them properly takes the autumn, and every one of them has to be checked against the rule it answers to before anybody sits it.
The waiting list on this page is open today. People on it hear first, in the order they signed up, and they get asked what the courses are missing while there is still time to add it.
Our courses are free to anyone with a role at the festival. They are part of taking part, and charging for them would price out exactly the volunteers we need.
One thing sits outside that. A food handler certificate comes from a recognised provider rather than from us, and providers charge their own fee. We publish the list of certificates Ottawa Public Health accepts when the food course opens, so nobody pays for the wrong one.
Accessibility training is required by Ontario law for employees and volunteers alike, so it applies to every single person with a role, including us.
The food course applies to anyone working a food point, because a certified food handler has to be at that point in every hour it trades. Safety on the ground applies to everyone who sets foot on site during build, show or strike.
The pavilion course and the marketplace course are ours. They exist because the same twenty questions arrive by email otherwise, and answering them once, properly, is better for everybody.
Yes, and it is short. Your certificate covers food safety; our course covers this field — where the handwash stations stand, how far the run is from the kitchen, what the temperature log looks like on our paperwork, and who to find when a fridge dies at two in the afternoon.
Upload the certificate to your account and it sits with the record of the course.
A named pass that opens the zones your role needs — your pavilion, the participants' area, the service gate, backstage for performers, the load-in for vendors. Multi-day roles carry a photograph on the badge.
It is issued on two conditions, and both are hard: the training for your role is passed, and the documents for your role are filed. Requests go in through the account two weeks before the event.
That is the plan, and the French site is being built as a full mirror rather than a summary. Until it exists, this page says so plainly instead of linking you to a page that is not there. Tell us on the waiting list which language you want to be taught in and it goes into the build order.
We do, with the people whose rules they carry. Accessibility content is written against the Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation and the City of Ottawa Special Events Guide. The food course is written against what Ottawa Public Health asks of a special event. The safety course is written against the emergency plan that goes in with our site application.
Where a course is still open — content, length, the check at the end — the page says so on the day it changes.
One form, thirty seconds. It puts you in the first intake, tells us which courses to write first, and gets you an email the week they open.
Open today · intake 01 · winter 2027
Six pages hold this section. Four of them are ways of taking part, and the last two sit underneath all four.
Join · 05 of 06