On 25 May 2020, in what was already turning out to be a turbulent year, the world watched on in disbelief as it learnt about the news of the death of George Floyd.
This sparked anger and reignited the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Social media saw users posting black squares, people protested, and companies across the globe pledged their support to combat racial injustice.
One year on, whilst the noise of the movement may have quietened down on the outside, on the inside, companies are busy putting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies and strategies in place, with employees holding their employers accountable if they fail to do so.
In response to the movement, the Event Marketing Association (EMA) took its own pledge to tackle inequality within the events industry, and in December 2020 the EMA DEI Committee was born.
Our mission is to support the BVEP with its and its members' vision to drive change and support sustainable growth for the UK events industry, ensuring that human differences are valued and recognised, and where every person feels welcomed, empowered, advanced, and valued.
To achieve this, we are focussing on the three E’s:
- Educate – to inform our members and help them to learn and understand what DEI means and its importance.
- Empower – to allow all our members a voice at the table.
- Engage – to give our members the opportunity to network and keep the conversation alive.
As a committee, we identified five key diversity categories to initially focus on:
- Race and ethnicity.
- Disability and accessibility.
- Gender.
- Poverty and social mobility (socio‐economic).
- Mental health and wellbeing.
We then hosted an event to encourage discussion amongst EMA members and to gather information on what issues they feel are the most relevant and require immediate action. From this, we ascertained four key areas to start working on improving DEI within, splitting into four sub‐committees to cover:
- Access to the industry and education.
- Speaker panel diversity.
- EMA education.
- Mental health and wellbeing.
It is an ongoing project and there is no time frame of when we can 'fix' this. As we continue to learn and seek to educate one another on all things DEI, it will be an ever‐evolving topic. We don’t all have the answers and so we hope that by organising various events (both educational and networking/socials) on each of the above topics, we continue our journey to keep the conversation alive and to support our members to drive change on behalf of their organisations and through their supply chains.
We are developing an events programme, for the remainder of the year which we encourage our members to attend as well as working with the BVEP and member associations working together to drive change. Other things in development include toolkits and best practice guides for our members to use in their day‐to‐day job. Longer-term, our aim is to help our members be DEI compliant and be better equipped and educated when organising events.
Words by Louise Dempsey, events and project manager at the Media Trust and Mai Cheung, head of events at EMEA‐ FTI Consulting, both are co‐chairs of the EMA DEI Committee.
A desire to travel led Holly Patrick to the business meetings and events world and she’s never looked back. Holly takes a particular interest in event sustainability and creating a diverse and inclusive industry. When she’s not working, she can be found rolling skating along Brighton seafront listening to an eclectic playlist, featuring the likes of Patti Smith, Sean Paul, and Arooj Aftab.
