FSN's Project Clinic

Other ears do for songs what most projects never get: a room of serious people paying attention and telling you what they see. The Project Clinic is that room for the other kind of work, the studio, the school, the festival, the collective, the tour, the app, the plan you've been carrying alone. Every session has two halves. The first half hour is an exercise done by everyone on their own project. The rest is the clinic: participants each bring their project and one real question, and get forty minutes. Ten to lay it out, a structured round where the room asks before it advises, then ten minutes for the maker to respond and decide what to take. The four weeks follow the Institute's arc: Week 1 · The Story. Mission and vision language, using the memory and storytelling prompts we ran at Watershed. The clinic that follows asks the oldest questions: what is this, who is it for, and why does it need to exist. Week 2 · The Plan. The X-Page Business Plan, a free-writing exercise on where the project has been and where it's going, shaped into one page: model, roles, what you need this year, what success looks like in three. Clinic questions turn to structure and sustainability. Week 3 · The Money. Funding and Resources 101, in the spirit of the Candid session: mapping foundations, public programs, residencies, commissions, in-kind support, earned revenue, and the partnerships that behave like funding, for each participant's actual project and country. Then the one-on-one funding brainstorm format from the Institute, done in pairs. A guest from the funding side joins the clinic. Week 4 · The Room. A Collider. Each participant presents their project in five minutes to an invited audience of artists, organizers, and supporters, then takes questions. The way the Institute ended, and the moment most fellows said the project became real. Between sessions, short assignments (your page, your resource list, your five minutes) and optional office hours. Everyone presents in the clinic at least once and at the Collider. Process: an Institute exercise each week, then facilitated peer critique in a fixed format; guest funder in week 3; public presentation in week 4. Output: mission and vision language, a one-page plan, a funder and resource map for your project, a five-minute pitch delivered to a real audience, and a room of people building the same kind of thing. Four sessions over four weeks, two hours each. Small cohort.