Holger Jan Schmidt is one of Europe's leading players in the festival sector. Among various topics, he focuses particularly on the sustainability and social responsibility of festivals and events. Holger is General Secretary of YOUROPE - the European Festivals Association - the largest association of popular music festivals in Europe, with over 100 members from 25 European countries. Part of his duties involves project managing the international Take A Stand initiative and campaign for the live music sector, launched in 2017 to create a movement encouraging social cohesion in our society as well as promoting awareness and tolerance. He also leads the pan-European think tank GO Group (Green Operations Europe), which focuses on sustainability and environmental issues at events. Holger worked for over twenty years at Germany's biggest free festival RHEINKULTUR in Bonn, with an audience of 160,000 a day, occupying a leading position from 1998 until the festival's last edition in 2011. Today, Holger is a booker, consultant and member of the management teams of various festivals, including DAS FEST in Karlsruhe and the SUPERBLOOM Festival in Munich. Holger contributes his expertise to various European-funded projects such as "3F - Future-Fit Festivals" (Creative Europe), "FUSION - Festivals as social innovation incubators" (Erasmus+), "FUTURE FESTIVAL TOOLS - green skills for event professionals" (Erasmus+), "GEX - Green Europe Experience" (Creative Europe) and "EVERYWH2ERE" - to bring mobile hydrogen energy to festivals (HORIZON 2020). He is co-author of the book "stay SOUND & CHECK yourself" dealing with stress and mental health in the live music, festivals and events sector, and co-authored "Sounds for Nature guidelines for environmentally friendly events". Holger holds a degree in media economics from the Rheinische Fachhochschule in Cologne, and was a lecturer in "Sustainable festival and event management" at the Hochschule Fresenius (Fresenius University of Applied Sciences) in Cologne and Düsseldorf. He is also an active musician himself.