San Francisco Chronicle Covers Cherilyn Parsons Stepping Down from the Bay Area Book Festival

Our client Cherilyn Parsons, who founded the Bay Area Book Festival in 2015 with no funding and no event production experience, was covered by the San Francisco Chronicle on the news that she is stepping down as executive director after nine years building it into one of the country's premier literary festivals.

Parsons left a nonprofit fundraising career to launch the festival on little more than a hunch that a walkable, weekend-long book festival belonged in the Bay Area. It grew from a first year with no track record into an event drawing tens of thousands of attendees and hundreds of authors to Berkeley every spring, with the San Francisco Chronicle as a founding media partner from year one. The Chronicle piece marks the close of that chapter and looks at what she built along the way.

Building something from a single idea into an institution over nearly a decade is exactly the kind of long-term platform building work we help clients with, and Parsons's run with the festival is as strong a case study as any.

Read the full story on SF Chronicle's Datebook.