Gatherings & Conferences

When crafting your headline speakers, break free from traditional white, male voices and recognize that there are experts of all races and ethnicities in every field.

• Expand your definition of who an expert is and how they present.

• Give Black, Latinx, Native Americans, and other people of color an opportunity to be an expert on topics beyond representing their racial community.

• Consider compensating your speakers.

Learn More: 7 Ways to Ensure Your Event Champions Diversity and Inclusion

Learn More: How Events Can Embrace Diversity and Champion Inclusion

80% of the top positions at nonprofits and foundations are led by white people. This statistic trickles down into every crevice of the philanthropic world, including who gets invited to events. Use your guest list to challenge the status quo.

• Market your event to organizations and individuals beyond your current networks and those that represent communities of color.

• Ensure there is diversity of age groups, sexual orientations, gender identities, religions, races, and power positions present at your event.

• Encourage attendance of staff with non-leadership roles.

Learn More: Event Diversity: 6 Ways to Make Your Events More Inclusive

Land is a living, breathing identity, and practicing mindfulness is key to recognizing and respecting the cultures connected to it. Select a venue that will open your audience up to new knowledge and do your homework about the location’s past and present-day culture.

• Seek input from local leaders, and compensate them for their time.

• Recognize a place’s past and celebrate the community it is today.

• Work to continually support these locales beyond your event.

Example: If you’re holding a gathering on indigenous land, understand that it has a history. Presently, these lands are thriving centers of culture, and you should work to build authentic relationships with the residents living there. Researching and learning more about a place will allow you to showcase and honor both the good — community, culture, etc. — and the bad of it — genocide, ethnic cleansing, etc.

Learn More: A Guide to Indigenous Land Acknowledgement

Voices that propel whiteness are the ones that are the loudest and heard most often. Make inclusivity a priority of your event by creating safe spaces within meetings that are welcoming of all perspectives.

• Develop an agenda that also reflects the interests of communities of color.

• Determine the cultural associations that could arise with the time, date, and place that you’re considering for your event.

• Use the concept of Speaking Order to shift power from those in the dominant culture to those historically marginalized in society.

Learn More: Decentering Whiteness and Creating Inclusive and Equitable Conferences

Don’t hesitate to speak to and coordinate with attendees to understand their accessibility needs to ensure a seamless and convenient event. Accessibility of an event can be defined as considerations for people with differing abilities, resources, or needs.

• Consider different modes of transport that allow people to easily and affordably commute to the event.

• Ensure you have incorporated necessary protocol to accommodate people with disabilities.

• If your event is ticketed, structure the pricing to accommodate people of all socio-economic status.

Learn More: 5 Ways To Avoid An Accessibility Fail

Learn More: 12 Tips to make events more accessible and inclusive

Your organization has the opportunity to support communities, cities, and vendors that are Black, Latino, Native American, or other people of color. The location you select is a direct investment in that community.

• Use your event as an opportunity to highlight a city or neighborhood that is a Black, Latino, Native American, or other community of color.

• Use Black and minority-owned businesses and vendors for your gathering.

• If your event is virtual, consider creative ways to invest in or highlight local business.

Learn More: How We Can Advance Support for Racial Equity and Racial Justice Funding

With a diverse audience comes a wide range of individual information-gathering. In order for your attendees to truly extract the full value of your event, it needs to appeal to multiple methods of learning.

• Provide a gamut of engagements to appeal and comfort all individuals.

• Give your audience the freedom to participate in creative forms of learning.

• Offer multiple forms of submission for attendee feedback.

Learn More: 7 Learning Styles to Incorporate at Your Next Conference

This step is crucial to understanding and evaluating the impact of your event. Use this step to really dig into who was in the room, and what they got out of your gathering.

• Collect and analyze demographic information about attendees.

• Establish a process for reviewing audience feedback.

• Put together a formal post-event roundup to go over demographics, key highlights, press/social media coverage, etc.

Learn More: How Data Analysis Helps Create Better Events