Gather
The Business of Gathering
Resolute & Gather
An independent research lab and advisory practice built around one question: what makes a gathering worth having? We study the economics of festivals, forums, and corporate events — and help the people funding them get more than attendance for their money.
Founding Statement
What makes a gathering worth having?
Every year, billions of dollars move into gatherings — festivals, forums, corporate summits, civic events — the full spectrum of human assembly that governments fund, companies sponsor, and communities build their identity around. Remarkably little rigorous thinking exists about whether any of it is working.
Resolute & Gather grows out of twenty-five years spent designing the gatherings where consequential decisions get made — across four continents, for clients who don't tolerate wasted time. That work taught us exactly what separates a gathering that creates lasting value from one that simply occurs.
We publish research on gathering economics. We help sponsors build event portfolios that earn their place. We help governments and foundations understand what their investment in bringing people together is actually producing — and what better design could produce instead.
The gathering industry is large, growing, and almost entirely unexamined. We intend to examine it.
Resolute & Gather — The business of bringing people together.
Attendance is not evidence of value.
What We Offer
Three ways in
For corporate sponsors
Sponsorship Worth Audit
An evidence-based review of your event sponsorship portfolio, measured against the strategic objectives it's meant to serve — not impressions, not logo placement, not what everyone else in your sector happens to be doing.
For municipalities & DMOs
Festival Impact Brief
A clear-eyed assessment of what a festival or event investment is actually producing for a community — and what a better-designed version of it could produce instead.
For organizers & leadership teams
Gathering Strategy Session
A focused working session that surfaces the real objective behind a gathering, narrows the design choices that matter, and ends with a plan — not a wish list.
Worth Showing Up
A study of what Canadian corporate sponsors really think about festival investment. Launching this fall.
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About
Twenty-five years in the room
Kel Currah has spent twenty-five years designing the gatherings where consequential decisions get made — ministerial roundtables, UN forums, coalition summits, and civic events across four continents, for clients including the OECD, the World Health Organization, the Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, and the Government of Canada.
That career built two things at once: a policy researcher's instinct for asking whether an investment is actually working, and a practitioner's hard-won knowledge of what makes a room work in the first place.
Resolute & Gather turns both toward the gathering industry itself. No sponsorship agency to protect. No festival body to defend. No theory to sell — only a quarter-century of evidence about what makes people travel toward each other, and stay.
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