Jacobs Impact Summit for Emerging Music Leaders

June 7 - 10, 2026

The future of music demands more than business as usual—it requires mastery of the diverse, essential skills required to confidently lead your organization into a new era. Are you ready to head the revolution?

The Jacobs Impact Summit is not a conference; it's a 3 1/2-day, high-intensity accelerator designed exclusively for the next generation of pioneering leaders in higher music education. In a world defined by seismic shifts in artistic paradigms and business models, the ability to architect meaningful change is the difference between simply surviving and truly leading.

Step into the world-renowned Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University from June 7-10, 2026, and emerge with a new clarity, a fresh network, and the strategic blueprint required to transform your institution and your career.

Ignite Your Leadership Impact

This elite summit cuts through the noise to deliver focused, actionable strategy across four essential pillars of 21st-century music leadership:

• On the Shoulders of Giants: Tradition as Launchpad Learn to craft visionary institutional evolution—not by discarding your legacy, but by honoring your deepest traditions even as you mobilize them toward innovation and lasting organizational change to prepare for a vital and secure future.
• Cultivate Your Ecosystem: Unifying Stakeholders Unlock the secrets to profound engagement. Gain sophisticated techniques for aligning faculty, inspiring staff, mobilizing students, and cultivating deep, lasting relationships with donors and boards to power your strategic goals.
• Know Your Power: Assessing Skills and Seizing Opportunities Move past intuition. Engage in targeted self-assessment to map your unique leadership profile, clarify your strengths, identify critical skill gaps, and strategically position yourself to seize the next level of career opportunity.
• The Blueprint for Unstoppable Leadership Translate ambition into administrative triumph. Receive practical frameworks, high-level mentorship, and a personalized action plan to immediately turn your leadership vision into measurable, high-Impact success.

Capped at 25 participants, this is an essential experience for aspiring Deans, program directors, influential department chairs, and the innovative administrative staff who refuse to wait for permission to lead. Your impact starts now.

Optional Accelerator Track: 1-on-1 Leadership Coaching

For participants dedicated to maximizing their personal and professional growth, we offer an optional, focused leadership coaching package. Summit content provides the blueprint; coaching provides the tailored accountability and sustained focus to ensure successful application.

You will be paired with a trained, professional leadership coach for six exclusive sessions designed to:

• Accelerate Personal Growth: Work through the specific, real-world challenges you face in your institution.
• Sustain Impact: Translate the Summit's theoretical concepts into long-term, observable behavioral and career changes.
• Master New Skills: Deepen your self-awareness and rapidly build competence in your identified areas for development.

This exclusive package includes six one-hour, post-Summit coaching sessions for an additional cost of $2,500. Invest in a partnership dedicated to making your vision a reality.

Summit Cost:

• Early Bird Registration: $2,250 if registered by March 1
• Standard Registration: $2,500 if registered between March 2 and May 1
• Accelerator Track: Registration plus $2500

Registration Deadlines:

• Registration Opens: December 1, 2025
• Early Bird Registration: by March 1, 2026
• Final Registration: May 1, 2026

Faculty:

Abra K. Bush, David Henry Jacobs Bicentennial Dean, Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University

David Bahanovich, Associate Provost, Curtis Institute

Jean Frankel, President and CEO of Ideas for Action