About

Some facilitators run a program. Jason LeVasseur builds a community.

A NACA Campus Legend Award recipient and APCA Virtual Artist of the Year, Jason is one of the most trusted names in campus leadership development. As a Certified Speaking Professional (CSP) — held by fewer than 20% of speakers worldwide — and a Certified Master Trainer and Virtual Master Presenter, he brings research-anchored frameworks, a performer’s energy, and a genuine educator’s heart to every campus he serves. A sought-after voice in student development and experiential leadership, he is a frequent guest on podcasts covering campus culture, advisor development, and student engagement.

His mission: help advisors build confident, connected student leaders.

After graduating from Wake Forest University, Jason taught 11th and 12th grade English while touring internationally as a musician — sharing stages with The Roots, Train, John Mayer, the Dave Matthews Band, Ludacris, J. Cole, and Maroon 5. With a lifetime involvement in summer camps — as a camper, counselor, and now program director — Jason naturally bridges those worlds with higher education, bringing the same spirit of belonging and experiential growth that defines great camp culture into college retreats, orientations, and leadership workshops.

Jason’s flagship framework, The Rock Star Project, uses music and the band metaphor to make leadership immediately accessible and memorable. Built around The Connected Leadership Framework— Connection, Communication, Collaboration, Credibility, and Culture — it gives student leaders a shared vocabulary and practical tools they can use the moment the retreat ends.

ORIENTATION PROGRAMS

GET YOUR SHOW ON THE ROAD
New Student Orientation Keynote
45–90 minutes

This is not just a keynote. It is an experience.

Built specifically for new student orientation, Get Your Show on the Road uses the music and band metaphor to help incoming students understand something they are ready to hear on Day One: they already have something to contribute. They do not need to wait until they feel ready, until they know more people, or until they find their thing. The band needs them now.

This is where Jason introduces the I³ Framework, the idea that every student in the room is on a journey from Invisible to Involved to Influential. It gives incoming students a language for their own growth and a roadmap they can carry through their entire college experience, starting from the moment they arrive.

High-energy, deeply personal, and custom-tailored to your campus goals and messaging, this keynote creates the kind of first impression that sets the tone for everything that follows. Jason draws on a career as a touring musician and a lifelong commitment to education to connect with students across every background, comfort level, and expectation, including the hard-to-reach ones in the back row. Jason connects.
THE BEST THING YOU CAN DO TODAY
Family Send-Off Keynote
30–60 minutes

You drove here holding on. This keynote helps you drive home letting go.

Every family in the room today is feeling some version of the same thing, pride, excitement, grief, worry, and the quiet, persistent question: are they going to be okay?

Jason has spent a lifetime on the other side of that question. As someone who has welcomed thousands of young people into residential communities and watched them transform in the moment they were given the space to do it, he knows what happens when families trust the process, and he knows what gets in the way when they don’t.

This keynote is not a lecture. It is not a checklist. It is an honest, funny, and deeply human conversation about what your student actually needs from you right now, and why the most powerful thing you can do today is believe in them enough to leave.

You prepared them for this. You just do not know it yet.

The I³ Framework—the same journey from Invisible to Involved to Influential that Jason introduces to students in the main orientation keynote—gives families a language for what their student is about to experience. Understanding that framework does not just reassure families. It transforms them from bystanders into the most important support system their student has.

They are going to struggle. They are going to fail at something. They are going to figure it out. And every time you resist the urge to fix it for them, you are giving them the greatest gift a family can give: the chance to become who they are capable of being.

Available as a standalone family program or paired with Get Your Show on the Road as a simultaneous split session, students in one room, families in another, everyone walking out ready for what comes next.
KICKOFF TO CONNECT
Gamified Connection Experience
Single Day or Multi-Day

Orientation gives students a schedule. Kickoff to Connect gives them a mission.
Whether your class measures student receives a physical Kickoff to Connect card on Day One, a gamified, self-led experience designed to spark real conversations, build genuine connections, and help new students engage with their campus and their peers in a way that feels nothing like an assignment.

The card is intentional by design. Each task is built around a specific connection goal, meeting a new person, discovering a campus resource, learning something about a classmate, or completing a shared challenge. Students work through the card at their own pace throughout orientation, accumulating experiences and connections along the way. Prizes, recognition, and friendly competition keep the energy high and the momentum building.

The result is an orientation experience where connection is not a scheduled event. It is happening everywhere, all the time, between every other thing on the agenda.

Personally designed by Jason, Kickoff to Connect is fully customized to your campus, your locations, your language, your culture, and your orientation goals. Built for a single day or across multiple days of orientation programming, it can be launched as part of any in-person program or licensed for ongoing use across multiple orientation cycles.
 
Three ways to bring Kickoff to Connect to your campus:

Launched — Jason introduces and launches Kickoff to Connect as part of any in-person orientation program. He sets the energy, explains the mission, announces the prizes, and sends students into the experience ready to connect.

Facilitated — The complete orientation day experience. Jason opens the day with Get Your Show on the Road, launches Kickoff to Connect, facilitates the experience throughout the day, and closes with an Open Mic Night celebration that brings the entire community together. Students arrive as strangers and leave as a community, all in one day.
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Licensed — Your campus owns the experience year after year. Jason delivers a fully customized Kickoff to Connect system built specifically for your campus, your locations, your language, your culture, and your goals. The license includes print-ready card files, a facilitation guide, a prize structure framework, and staff training resources so your team can run it confidently without Jason on site. Jason remains available as a consultant throughout the life of the license, taking the work off your plate so your team can focus on everything else orientation demands.
THE ROCK STAR MEET & Greet
Community Building Experience
60–90 minutes

Every incoming class has a moment when they stop being strangers. This is that moment.

The Rock Star Meet & Greet is a large-scale, community-wide gathering experience, held in a fieldhouse, a gym, a quad, under a stand of trees, or on a football field, anywhere the entire incoming class can come together in one place. The setting is intentional. The scale is the point. When an entire community shares the same space, the same music, the same laughter, and the same experience at the same moment, something shifts. Students stop being a collection of individuals and start becoming a class.

Jason has facilitated The Rock Star Meet & Greet with new staff, new students, and at association conferences across the country. In every context the outcome is the same: a room full of strangers becomes a community. The format is proven, the energy is real, and the connections last long after the event ends.

Jason combines live music, guided interaction, and his signature facilitation style to move the room from strangers to community. Students leave with shared connections, a shared language, and the kind of belonging that can’t be instilled with any name tag or handshake.

Available as a standalone experience or as part of any orientation day or multi-day partnership.
OPEN MIC NIGHT
Orientation Entertainment Experience
90–180 minutes

The best thing that can happen at the end of Orientation Day or Week is this: a first-year student who arrived without knowing a single person walks up to a microphone in front of 400 of their new classmates… And performs.

Jason LeVasseur has produced and hosted Open Mic Nights on college campuses across the country. As a professional musician who has shared stages with Train, Dave Matthews Band, and John Mayer, he knows how to run a room, and more importantly, he knows how to make students brave enough to get on one. He hosts, performs, coaches first-time participants from the wings, and creates an environment where the audience is rooting for every single person who takes the stage.

The result is not just an entertainment event. It is a community-defining moment that students talk about for the rest of their time on campus.
CREATIVE CAMPUS
CONNECTIONS (C³)
Campus-Wide Activation
Single Day or Multi-Day

Multiple campus locations. Customized activities. One incoming class that leaves feeling like they already belong here.
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C³ is a campus-wide experiential program that does three things simultaneously that no keynote can do: it moves students, in teams or small groups, through physical campus space so they stop feeling like strangers in a foreign place, it creates peer relationships through shared experience rather than forced introduction, and it generates the kind of collective energy and memory that students carry into the first week of classes.

One of the most powerful features of C³ is what it does to the campus tour. Rather than walking students past buildings and reciting facts, C³ integrates key campus locations directly into the connection activities themselves. Students do not just learn where the library is. They have a meaningful experience there with people they just met. The campus stops being a map and becomes a memory.

Kickoff to Connect can be woven throughout the C³ experience, with the card tasks mapped directly to the activities and campus locations students are moving through. The result is a seamless, fully integrated orientation activation where every moment has a purpose and every connection has a destination.

The activities, conversation starters, and campus-specific content that power C³ are designed and curated by Jason as part of the customization process. The details are intentional, the methodology is proven, and the specifics are part of what makes every C³ experience unique to the campus it serves.

Each program is fully customized to your campus, with the number of activities, locations, and goals tailored to your specific student population, available spaces, and orientation schedule. Every C³ program is different, and the supplies and setup needed depend entirely on the activities selected. Some experiences run with no materials at all. Others are best served with tables, props, or activity-specific supplies. During the customization process Jason works directly with your team to determine exactly what is needed, who provides it, and how setup is handled, so there are no surprises on the day of the event.
 
Three ways to bring C³ to your campus:

Launched — Jason comes to your campus, trains your orientation team in person on how to set up and facilitate the full C³ experience, and hands it off to them to run. Once the team is ready, Jason moves on. Your team owns the day.

Facilitated — The complete orientation partnership. Jason works with your team in advance to design a multi-day experience built around your specific schedule, goals, and student population. Programming can include the family send-off keynote, the opening keynote, C³, Kickoff to Connect, The Rock Star Meet & Greet, and Open Mic Night, woven together into a seamless orientation experience from move-in morning through closing night. Your team shows up. Jason takes it from there.

​Licensed — Your campus owns the experience year after year. Jason delivers a fully customized C³ system built for your specific locations, activities, and goals, complete with setup guides, activity instructions, and staff training resources. Jason remains available as a consultant throughout the life of the license so your team can run it confidently every orientation cycle.
OL & RA TRAINING | LEADERSHIP RETREATS
Half-Day, Full-Day, and Multi-Day

Jason specializes in OL and RA pre-service training and student leadership retreat facilitation, designing experiences that build real community, develop leadership identity, and give student staff a shared language they can use the moment training ends. At the center of every OL and RA training is the integration of two educational schema: The Rock Star Project philosophy—which uses the music and band metaphor to help student leaders understand their role, their value, and their impact on the community around them—and the I³ Framework, which gives them a roadmap for moving every student they serve from Invisible to Involved to Influential.

These are not abstract concepts. They are tools OLs and RAs can pick up and use on day one of their role. Through interactive workshops, live music, storytelling, and his signature facilitation style, he brings energy and genuine connection to every session, and he works closely with advisors, resident directors, and orientation professionals beforehand to make sure every moment is tailored to the specific needs of their campus and their cohort. His approach to residential staff training is also informed by something most leadership speakers cannot offer: a lifetime of work in residential summer camp staff development, and a track record as a guest keynote speaker at American Camp Association conferences. The skills that make a great camp counselor, presence, adaptability, and community building in live-in environments where relationships are everything, are the same skills that make a great OL and RA. Jason bridges those worlds naturally and he brings that depth to every residential training he delivers.

Programs are available as a half-day, full-day, or multi-day retreat. The following programs are examples of what Jason brings to the room, and hosts are not limited to only these offerings. Every engagement is customized, and no two retreats look exactly the same:
 
Backstage Pass: Building Trust and Connection — The foundation workshop. Students discover how trust is built, what gets in the way of it, and how to create the conditions for real community in their residence halls, their OL groups, and their student organizations.

Passing the Torch — Designed for leadership transitions. Outgoing and incoming OL and RA cohorts work through what it means to hand something off with intention, and what it means to receive it with gratitude and responsibility.

The Paradiddle — Named for the foundational drumming pattern every musician learns before they can play anything else. This workshop is about openness to learning, helping student leaders embrace the discomfort of not knowing yet, and understanding that being willing to practice is more valuable than already being good.

Write One Song in One Hour — Jason’s signature team-building experience. Groups co-write and perform an original song together in sixty minutes. No musical experience required. The outcome is not a song. It is the experience of making something together that none of them could have made alone.

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This is the second year in a row that we brought Jason back to campus. I am still on cloud 10,000 – It was wonderful! Jason got students really comfortable to the point where we had student after student going up there on stage with him. Some students afterwards said, “where did I find the strength, where did I find the energy?” It’s because Jason was really really powerful and he knows how to inspire and engage the audience.

John Rawlins III
Director of Multicultural Affairs
Ithaca College​

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Bestselling Author of Permanent Midnight and I, Fatty

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For advisors specifically, his Tour Manager workshop reframes the advisor role through the lens of a rock band’s tour manager — keeping the band on the road, the relationships intact, and the mission moving forward. Advisors from Springfield College to Methodist University have called it one of the most relevant professional development experiences of their careers in higher education.

His common hosts & audiences are Orientation Leaders, Resident Advisors, Student Government, club leaders, student athletes, and First Year Experience programs at community colleges, liberal arts colleges, research universities, technical colleges, and international campuses. His Virtual Leadership Academy — available in 3, 5, 8, or 12-part series formats — became a campus staple for high-engagement online programming, with multiple partners reporting that student attendance nearly doubled by the final session.

Campus partners across the board describe Jason the same way: responsive, flexible, genuinely invested — and one of the easiest partners they’ve ever worked with.
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Jason has presented at the national conferences of NACA, APCA, NIRSA, and the American Camp Association, and has partnered with more than 2,500 organizations across every institution type. Long-term campus partners — including Ferris State University, Simmons University, Lone Star College, and Grays Harbor College — keep bringing him back because the results are consistent and the students keep asking for more.

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