Hoping it’s okay to drop down to the object level for a bit...something that’s been bugging me about events like Solstice is the degree to which they resist being self-documenting. My ideal in this regard would be the Jewish Seder.
If you think about how a Seder works: there is a Hagaddah, where nearly everything that is said or done or sung is listed in the Hagaddah and read from it verbatim—it is an outline, it is a summary, and it is also the primary content. Most importantly, a Hagaddah explains its own structure; it starts out with text that clearly says what we-the-participants are collectively trying to do and why.
And everybody hears that explanation. The structure of the ceremony—what are we doing now, what will we do after that? - is not just intended as private knowledge for people running the ceremony—it’s right out there for the participants to know as well. All of them.
So if somebody invites you to a Seder and you walk in blind having never been before, you immediately are given a hook to hang the experience on. “We are here tonight to tell the story of X in the manner Y which we think is important for reasons Z”. The person who goes even once is clearly told as part of the event what it was the event was trying to do and if they keep a copy of that Hagaddah on their way out they themselves could run a very similar service next year by making some copies and following the instructions therein.
The fact that Seders are self-documenting and don’t change much year-over-year substantially reduces how “heroic” one has to be to run one. You still have to coordinate finding a room and people to fill it and ingredients to put on the seder plate, but once the guests are present running the event itself is easy-peasy; anybody who had ever attended one could pretty easily figure out how to run one.
The polar opposite of that approach would be to invite people to events which appear to be run by a Mysterious Old Wizard, wherein one section is labeled “have somebody get up and deliver a topical original sermon on the theme of being scared and hopeless in the face of certain doom” and another is labeled “have somebody deliver a topical original sermon on the theme of renewed hopefulness in progress and human ingenuity” and another part is labeled “now have somebody perform some original songs they just wrote this month incorporating themes that fit with the aforementioned original sermons”. This seems to me like playing the game on Hard Mode. Maybe there’s no way around it when you’re experimenting with a new format the first time, or even the first few times—the person starting such a thing is a Mysterious Old Wizard who has a wizard’s skillset and wants to iterate quickly to see what works—but after you’ve been at it several years it might be time to lower the difficulty level from Hard to Normal.
Private education in the third world is quite inexpensive—cheap enough to be affordable to a substantial fraction of the poorest families—according to The Beautiful Tree ( https://www.amazon.com/Beautiful-Tree-Personal-Educating-Themselves/dp/1939709121 ).