Twrl Milk Tea CEO Pauline Ang (left) and CMO Olivia Chen took part in the first iteration of a new program that helps minority-owned businesses in consumer products navigate their first trade-show experience.

A first-of-its-kind trade-show program is helping food and beverage entrepreneurs of color break through barriers in consumer packaged goods (CPG). The first 10 participants of the eight-week training and mentoring program — called “(included) ACCESS” — “graduated” by exhibiting March 7-11 at Natural Products Expo West 2023 in Anaheim, California.

Cindy Li

The program, designed by (included), a collective of BIPOC founders and executives in the F&B sector of CPG, is funded by Informa Markets’ New Hope Network, which produces Natural Products Expo events, and the Specialty Food Association, which hosts the Summer and Winter Fancy Food Shows. It provides BIPOC founders with mentorship, a peer community, media exposure, and other resources, and culminates in free booth sponsorship at a trade show — opportunities founders and CEOs of color historically have lacked.

“This program is so critical for BIPOC founders who face tons of obstacles — including the lack of capital, retail connections that can get their product in front of customers, and the resources to bring them success at trade shows,” Cindy Li, director of (included) ACCESS, told Convene.

Li, founder and “Tea-EO” of Boulder-based Uproot Teas, speaks from experience. She was sponsored by (included) to exhibit at her first trade show when there was not yet a program in place to prepare her for what to expect. “I didn’t quite understand just how critical a trade show is,” she said. “At my first trade show, a buyer from Costco came by and we had a 30-second conversation and they gave me their card.” It became very clear to her that trade show exposure can ignite retail deals for a brand.

The ACCESS program was designed using feedback from Li and others based on their first show experiences. The course’s eight virtual sessions cover everything from what materials are needed for a booth and how it should be staffed to how to attract buyers.

The founders of Twrl Milk Tea completed the ACCESS training and mentoring program before exhibiting at Expo West in early March.

Program participants, all members of (included), went through a selection process in which six judges vetted their applications. Criteria included the company being “retail ready,” Li said. “They have a product, they have the packaging, they have the branding,” she said. “The only thing that’s missing is their access to be in front of buyers and people who could help bring them to the next level.”

The founders of San Francisco–based, ready-to-drink Twrl Milk Tea, CEO Pauline Ang and CMO Olivia Chen, participated in the program’s first cohort and exhibited at Expo West in March. It was the third time they had exhibited at a trade show, but they admitted they had “limited learnings from our previous shows,” Chen wrote in an email to Convene prior to Expo West. “All the education [in the program] has been eye-opening.”

Chen cited the program’s one-on-one mentorship as being invaluable, and said they’ve gained a network of peers who they believe will collaborate with and support one another even beyond Expo West.

“It’s our hope that our brands together will reflect the diverse cultural landscape of today,” Chen wrote, “and that our children, seeing the products of their cultures made by beloved brands and enjoyed by the wider population, will feel a greater sense of acceptance, inclusion, and value.”

More to Come

The (included) ACCESS program will continue on after Expo West this year at the Summer Fancy Food Show on June 25-27 at New York City’s Javits Center and at Natural Products Expo East, Sept. 20-23 at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia. Applicants must first join (included) at includedcpg.com, where they also will find a community hub and helpful resources.

Curt Wagner is digital editor at Convene. Ascent is supported by the PCMA Foundation.

Madison Butler, founder of HR and DEI consultancy Blue Haired Unicorn, presents “Inclusion Before Diversity: An Empathy Workshop” at PCMA Educon 2022. Butler launched two resource directories listing Black speakers and executives. (Whatever Media Group)

Frustrated by hearing that conference organizers couldn’t find Black speakers — and the fact that they were seeking them out at the last minute to speak during Black History Month for free — Madison Butler invited Black speakers to drop their contact information into her LinkedIn feed in November of 2021. The list in her feed grew exponentially in a matter of days and quickly led her to create two resource directories — the Black Speakers Collection and Black Executives Collection — now numbering more than 3,000 members.

“It’s going so well,” Butler, founder of HR and DEI consultancy Blue Haired Unicorn and a PCMA Educon 2022 keynote speaker, told Convene when we checked in with her in late January. “We have a LinkedIn audio series now called ‘The Clap Back’ and it will be announced as a podcast next month!”

Read the story of how it began by clicking the link: A New Resource Directory of — and for — Black Speakers

Desirée Knight speaks at the 2022 PCMA Visionary Awards. Knight is the new chair of PCMA’s 2023 Board of Directors and Trustees.

Desirée Knight, CAE, CMP, DES, has held several key volunteer roles at PCMA, contributing to the efforts of the Convening Leaders Content Committee from 2016–2017 and the Diversity and Inclusion Committee from 2018–2019, as well as serving as a member of the PCMA Board of Directors since 2019. All of that work culminates in the role she assumes tomorrow, a job she has had in her sights for years.

“During my first Convening Leaders, I whispered to myself, ‘I will be the Chair of PCMA someday,’” said Knight, senior director of education and meetings for the American Railway Engineering and Maintenance-of-Way Association (AREMA). “Thanks to perseverance and always saying ‘yes’ when I was asked to volunteer when I got a call, that dream is finally coming true.”

She recently spoke with Convene about challenges facing the industry, her views on the evolution of work, and her goals during her term as Chair — for PCMA, and for herself.

What will you be focusing on in 2023?

I am passionate about youth development and the PCMA 20 in Their Twenties program. Although that program has a great structure, it must be revamped to create a pipeline for future PCMA leaders. Currently, the program recognizes the brightest in the industry, but we need to make available professional development opportunities that will help architect their future leadership capabilities. This includes providing them with an executive coach and an industry mentor. There are so many talented, experienced planners who would make great partners for this group of individuals.

We must take a front-row seat in developing programs for a more sustainable environment. Since the earth is warming at alarming rates, certain crops cannot yield results because the area is too warm. Why is this important to business event strategists? Supply-chain issues are a major problem with sourcing certain foods and the price of F&B will continue to rise — while Mother Earth suffers. Not only is this a human issue, but this is also a bottom-line issue. According to [entrepreneur agency] Common Thread Collective, the F&B [market] in 2021 was $435.3 billion, yet globally by 2025, [revenue] is expected to increase to $856.9 billion. This will affect all our meeting budgets.

Finally, inclusivity is high on my list. I have been invited into collaborative and strategic environments because of my skillset and every organization should have this mindset. PCMA has been at the forefront of having an inclusive board, however, there is still room for growth within professional development. During my term, I would like to see all our programs have a scorecard to ensure they are inclusive and inviting for everyone. We currently work with groups such as LGBT Meeting Professionals Association and are starting conversations with the National Coalition of Black Meeting Professionals. I would also like to see a partnership with an organization that focuses on disability, which can help us round out our inclusive environment.

What motivated you to take on this voluntary leadership role?

I started my career many years ago in Los Angeles, and when I moved to the East Coast, I was asked by my employer to get involved with PCMA. I was told it would be a great community for me to create industry friendships that would be part of my village. My CEO at the time was so correct. My first volunteer role for years was on the Awards Committee, and then I moved on to the Convening Leaders and EduCon Education Committee. … I believe in PCMA’s mission and vision and wanted to help shape the future of PCMA’s global presence. Sheriff Karamat has done a great job of helping to mold our vision, along with the board and volunteers who are at the backbone of PCMA’s legacy.

What are some of the greatest challenges facing meeting professionals in 2023?

COVID-19 certainly has changed how we do business, and our industry is still trying to recoup lost revenue. We are still dealing with supply-chain issues, staffing, mental health, and increased costs. Staff is stretched beyond capacity with increased workloads and little or no additional support.

What are some of the greatest challenges for CVBs, venues, and other industry partners in 2023?

Costs are at an all-time high, yet as business event professionals, we are responsible for the bottom line. We will have to work together to find a happy medium and help to create attendee experiences that will not break the bank. The challenge comes with developing a narrative that will be enjoyed by our customers and that requires a partnership between the city, venue, industry partners, and planners. More than ever, working collectively to design a well-orchestrated immersive experience is extremely important. Especially since we are competing with maintaining attention spans and still overcoming fear for some to travel.

The pandemic has changed a lot about the way people work. Has your mindset about work and leadership changed, and if so, how?

No. I have always believed that if you get your work done, there is no need to work in an office. Has COVID made that easier? Yes. We have had the tools before to create a collaborative environment, virtually, but the world knows now globally, that we can meet at any time via a virtual platform. I believe by allowing people to work where they are most comfortable, I am helping them with their quality of life. Self-care is important to me and if working without commuting to a building will provide time for staff to get up later or spend more time with their families, then I am helping them be happier employees. After all, happy employees create great customer experiences for all stakeholders internally and externally.

What are some of your own goals for 2023, personally or professionally?

I finished school during the pandemic and acquired my Bachelor of Science Degree from the University of Maryland. I also got my DES to round out my skillset. I enjoy attending school and would like to start working on my MBA sometime this year.

What is one book you feel everyone in the events industry should read?

I am trying to read or listen to more books, with the goal of finishing 12 books this year. The book I feel everyone should read is How to Win at Anything by Jo Owen. This book discusses strategies for building and maximizing your influence in any setting.

Casey Gale is managing editor of Convene. This interview has been edited and condensed.

Inclusive leaders embrace their biases in order to overcome them, said inclusive leadership expert Melissa Majors.

Everyone has biases, said inclusive leadership expert Melissa Majors during a PCMA Midwest Chapter DEI education event in September.

“If you have a brain, you’re biased,” said Majors, founder and CEO of the consulting firm, Melissa Majors Consulting. Biases are a threat-protection mechanism humans have always had, she said, but “the most inclusive leaders don’t deny those biases exist — they embrace their biases.”

Majors discussed each of the seven habits she presents in her book, The 7 Simple Habits of Inclusive Leaders, and how leaders, by incorporating inclusive practices, inspire higher performance levels from their teams and drive much higher profitability.

She also offered audience members three steps they can follow to mindfully mitigate their own biases. They are:

1. Examine your thoughts. Unconscious thoughts will occur, but humans are able to analyze them. “Ask yourself: ‘Did they earn my distrust? If not, my biases are probably influencing me,’” Majors said. “The word ‘earn’ is the litmus test in whether you are judging someone fairly for their character or because of your biases.”
2. Identify your patterns of bias. Pay attention to “those little voices that pop into your head” when you’re interacting with people different from you, she said. You may learn you are biased toward a group of people and overcome it.
3. Plan your next steps. Then, Majors suggests, hold the thought: “I will mindfully choose to view and treat them equally, just like I do others.”

Curt Wagner is digital editor at Convene.

The DID Beats + Bites + Backgrounds networking experience was designed to connect Black professionals across the design industry.

Like many event professionals, when the world shut down in March 2020, Candace Charpentier went on an involuntary, COVID-induced break from her job as a designer at event services company Freeman, where she had worked for more than a decade. For Charpentier, who is based in Rhode Island, the following months were far from empty.

Candace Charpentier

“There were just so many things happening in our world,” the designer said. Alongside the COVID pandemic, the murder of George Floyd reawakened questions about how we can be better as a country, she said. And as a Black person, she asked herself, “What do I need to do? I’m a designer, but how can I use that to also be an activist for people like me and for my children?”

Some of the ways that Charpentier answered that question included reaching out to small Black-owned businesses that had been selling products at in-person venues like flea markets and helping them shift their sales to an online platform. She also joined her town council’s DEI school committee, which was tackling issues such as how to hire more Black teachers. As events began to come back, Charpentier started thinking about what came next — she knew that she wanted to continue working toward diversity, equity, and inclusion, she said. Fortuitously, when Freeman called Charpentier to ask her to come back to work, she learned that, like her, the company hadn’t been standing still on DEI issues during the pandemic.

Freeman was among the 19 global companies that signed on as cofounders in June 2020 when the design company MillerKnoll launched the Diversity in Design (DID) Collaborative to address racial representation in the design industry, where fewer than 5 percent of designers are Black. When Charpentier returned to Freeman as an associate creative director, she took on another role as well: as part of a DID working group looking for ways to increase that percentage.

One of the things that sets the DID Collaborative apart — Fast Company recently named it a General Excellence winner in its 2022 Innovation by Design Awards — is that “first and foremost, we’re not approaching the solution to diversity in individual companies in a competitive environment,” said DID’s executive director, Todd Palmer. DID, which counts big companies like PepsiCo and 3M as well as smaller design studios in its roster — currently at 53 members — asks participants to invest intellectual capital toward solving the problem along with a commitment to working together, Palmer said. That includes sharing the strategies that have worked for their organizations, as well as the specialized expertise of individuals like Charpentier, he said. “It really has involved deep collaboration.”

DID Collaborative companies work together to expose high school students to career options in the design industry, where less than 5 percent of designers are Black.

The group’s first co-designed event was “Designed By,” a youth design fest held at Detroit’s College for Creative Studies on March 18. The day-long event introduced more than 200 high school students to 32 design professionals, including DID Collaborative representatives like Charpentier and local Black designers. “We’re coming from all areas,” Charpentier said, including “furniture, fashion, shoe- wear designers, digital designers, UX and UI, and print.”

DID repeated the job fair event on Sept. 29 in Detroit, incorporating what the team had learned from the first event, including the feedback that students wanted to play a more hands- on role. A local student served as the event’s emcee, and part of the day was dedicated to a design challenge based on a local problem — flooding — linked to disrupted weather patterns and aging public infrastructure. “We presented the problem of climate change and how it affects Detroit,” Charpentier said, “and these kids were brilliant.” Student proposals ranged from innovative drainage systems to creating jobs for formerly incarcerated community members as ecological community healers. “Having designers that are diverse gives you such a wonderful pool of creativity,” she said, “but that diversity of thought is often left out of conversations because we’re sometimes not included.”

At the September event, speakers included Akil Alvin, CEO and global chief creative officer Digital Detroit Media, a multimedia content creation company. Alvin, who grew up in the same neighborhood as some of the student participants, “is 28 and he talked to [the students] in a way that was so accessible,” Charpentier said. “Sometimes creatives and designers can speak in ways that block you out and isolate people, just by not using accessible language. He really repped the neighborhood. He told the students: ‘I know what it’s like to grow up here. I know how difficult it was for you to get here today.’

“I think that’s one of the important things about DID,” she said. “The people who show up really care. And I think because we’re also Black, we realize the importance of programs like this. When you see someone like yourself standing here, you really know you can do it.”

Job fair designers took feedback from an earlier event and redesigned a second gathering, including using a local student as emcee and incorporating hands-on design thinking challenges based on real-world community problems.

In addition to the job fair, DID also designed and sponsored an evening event in Detroit to build community among the DID network and local Black designers. “What we do can be really lonely depending on where you’re working,” Charpentier said. “You can go days, weeks, or months without seeing someone who looks like you on a call.” And networking as a minority can feel off-putting, she said. “You think, ‘Oh, I’m going to be the only [Black person] there. No one’s probably going to want to talk to me. And if they do, they’re going to use language that automatically tries to isolate me or make me realize I shouldn’t be in the space,’” she said. “There are weird little microaggressions that happen. So, you get a little tense.”

In contrast, the Beats + Bites + Backgrounds networking experience organized by Charpentier with Shanttel Liberato, from DID, Sheri Crosby Wheeler from Fossil Group, and Patricia Chua from the Civilization design studio — featuring a DJ, food, and Black speakers — could not have come out of a different group, Charpentier said. “We all said it felt like going to a family reunion. The instant I walked in, I was comfortable because I knew I was in a space where I wasn’t going to have to prove that I belong there.”

Candace Charpentier (left) and Sheri Crosby Wheeler welcome Black designers to the Beats + Bites + Backgrounds networking event.

Todd Palmer

Designed Thinking

When a group of designers comes together to solve problems, it should be no surprise that design thinking is involved. “Sometimes that requires not moving slowly,” said DID Collaborative executive director Todd Palmer, “but moving deliberately.”

The initiative has focused its initial events in Detroit, where 97 percent of the students in the public system are Black. “We’re asking: How do you do a design fair differently?” Palmer said.

“What are those things that are barriers to introducing Black teens to job experiences? And then doing [the event] once, learning and getting feedback, and then doing it again. In this collaborative mode, we’re not trying to be the biggest — we’re really trying to get it right.”

The organization will produce the “Designed By” event in Detroit again in the spring 2023 and will have a presence, including repeating the Beats + Bites + Backgrounds networking experience, at SXSW 2023 in March in Austin, Texas. Palmer said they plan to expand the “Designed By” event footprint in the U.S. next fall, when “we believe we’ll have a toolkit that can be relevant to other communities.”

A Safer Space

Freeman’s participation in and support for DID has changed how Candace Charpentier feels about speaking up in internal meetings, she said. It’s scary “raising your hand to say to leaders: ‘From a Black point of view, I would not do this.’” Recently, when it was suggested that AI be used to create images for a project, Charpentier pointed out to her white colleagues the problems with AI software for people of color. “Facial recognition software, for us, is not helpful. It’s dangerous,” she said. “It categorizes us in ways that it doesn’t categorize other groups.” Prior to her — and her Freeman colleagues’ — participation in DID, “I would’ve probably been very fearful” while speaking up, she said. She still would have done it, she said, but it would have been with a feeling of doom.

As an industry, Charpentier said, “if we want to grow, we need to start thinking about real ways of being inclusive.” Charpentier recalled directing a recent event in New York City, where the majority of the crew setting up the event was Black. “By the [second] day, crew members were coming up to me and fist bumping me, and saying, ‘Wow, Sis, I’m so glad to see you here. We’ve never met a Black creative director. How is it possible?’” Charpentier said. “Everyone, from the crew to the janitors, were just so supportive, because they’ve never seen someone like me before. That hurt. I was happy to be that for them, But I was sad that they’ve never seen it before.”

Barbara Palmer is deputy editor Convene. Ascent is supported by the PCMA Foundation.

In a survey conducted by job search engine Adzuna, one-third of respondents said they would not attend a job interview without first knowing the salary range.

On Nov. 1, New York City became the latest municipality to enact a salary transparency law, requiring employers advertising jobs in the city to provide “a good faith salary range for every job, promotion, and transfer opportunity.” On Jan. 1, 2023, a similar law will take effect in California, requiring companies with 15 or more employees to include pay details in both internal and external job listings as well as report pay details to the state.

The new legislation marks a growing trend toward salary transparency, one that is prompting employers to take bigger steps in what many say is a crucial strategy in achieving greater pay equity for all. According to HR Dive, 10 states plus numerous cities and counties now have laws or regulations on the books that require employers to disclose compensation at various points in the hiring process. Those regulations can vary, often significantly. A Connecticut statewide law requires employers to provide a pay range upon a candidate’s request or prior to an offer being made (whichever comes first), while Colorado’s Equal Pay for Equal Work Act requires employers to list compensation up front in job listings.

Many support the idea of increased salary transparency, seeing it as an essential step in closing the gap between, as pay expert Katie Donovan says, “the tallest, whitest dude” in the room and female and minority workers. “To be paid equitably, you want to earn what white men are earning. The median of everyone is less than the median of white men,” she said in a March 2022 bankrate.com survey.

According to a recent white paper on the topic from Adzuna, a job search engine, the U.S. ranked as the second worst, out of 19 total markets, for pay disclosure, with only one in 35 job ads including salary or salary-range information.

Job seekers are finding that some employers are using creative workarounds to skirt those new, stricter regulations, undermining the point of the legislation. In a Twitter thread started by writer Victoria M. Walker on Nov. 1 that has 12,700 likes at the time of this writing, she linked to several job listings in New York City with spectacularly broad salary ranges, commenting “I can already see that the ‘good faith’ part of the [NYC] law is going to be tested.”

In an online poll Convene conducted in October on LinkedIn, the vast majority of 229 respondents — nearly nine out of 10 — said they don’t work for an organization that makes salaries transparent. And a question raised by events specialist Brandi Kelley in the poll’s comments area underscored that not everyone is a fan of the idea: “The more important question is: Do you want to work for an organization that makes salaries transparent?” Naomi Clare Crellin, founder and CEO of Storycraft Lab, responded, “Salary ranges and increase expectations, yes. My actual salary?? Noooo….”

There also can be unexpected downsides to salary transparency, according to Zoe Cullen, an assistant professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. She recently told The Economist’s Money Talks podcast that when she looked at several studies on the topic, research showed that while policies that increase transparency generally helped to close the pay gap between men and women, overall wages fell by 2 percent. Cullen believes this is a result of firms anticipating increased salary negotiations with workers. “So an extra dollar [paid] to somebody means they also have to pay an extra dollar to many other employees,” she explained in the podcast, “and that incentivizes the employer to bargain quite aggressively, and it means the optimal wages that they’re setting are going to be lower, on average.”

RELATED: Salary Transparency: One Way to Combat Gender Pay Inequity

Still, according to Adzuna’s recent white paper on the topic, “more companies are putting vital salary information in their job ads since 2022. This could be driven by a cascade of major legislative changes initiated by some of the major states — New York, Washington, and California.”

In late October, Endless Events founder and #eventprofs community manager Will Curran started a free jobs board specifically for event professionals (jobs.eventprofscommunity.com) with the caveat that every job posted must include a salary range. Within the first week of launching, the site drew more than 1,000 applicants, and Curran has set the goal of listing 100 active jobs by the end of 2022, and at press time there was 31 active listings on the site. When Curran shared the site on his LinkedIn feed, some praised it specifically for including compensation details. “Thank you for creating this, and for the transparency on salary range!” posted Allison Pieter, founder and president of Cassis Productions.

“I think every other comment [on the site] is [about] the salary transparency; it has been the thing they love the most [about] it,” Curran said. One challenge specific to the events industry that Curran thinks stands in the way of more salary transparency is that many opportunities are contract roles, which can make sharing pay details more complicated — but not impossible.

“Some [employers] are like, ‘Oh, I’m paying by the hour, how can I do this?’” Curran said. The solution? He suggests showing an annualized version of the pay instead.

Jennifer N. Dienst is senior editor at Convene.

Coming to Convening Leaders 2023

In January at Convening Leaders 2023, a Convene Stage session “Does Salary Have to Be a Tightly Kept Secret?” will explore how salary transparency affects wage inequality (including a deeper dive into Convene’s latest Salary Survey). Register for Convening Leaders 23.

R.I.S.E. founder Hilina Ajakaiye, surrounded by some of the volunteers who organized the 1,400-person women’s leadership conference in 2022, first created the conference in 2017.

Hilina Ajakaiye draws on her experience as an immigrant — and conference organizer — to invite everyone to the table in the Boston hospitality and events industry.

When Hilina Ajakaiye joined the Greater Boston Convention & Visitors Bureau (GBCVB) in 2020 as executive vice president, she was new to working in the hospitality and events industry — but not to organizing conferences. Ajakaiye is the founder and executive director of the R.I.S.E. Women’s Leadership Conference (Realizing Inspiration & Sustaining Excellence), held for the fifth time on Sept. 8 at the Rhode Island Convention Center in Providence. Ajakaiye, who previously worked as a marketing and brand strategy executive for a global food retailer, had known next to nothing about the logistics of organizing meetings when she conceived of the women’s leadership conference in 2017, she told Convene, but she knew about the powerful influence of mentors from her own experience.

When she was 12, her mother sent Ajakaiye and her two sisters to Boston from Ethiopia, where they were born, to live with their father, who had previously left the country for reasons including political ones. Although he had practiced law in Ethiopia, he had to repeat his education in the U.S., which he did, “while driving cabs and working overnight in hotels,” Ajakaiye said. “My sisters and I were latchkey kids running up and down Mass Avenue. What saved me … is that I have always run into women who have embraced me. I’ve had all this incredible support.”

She also was influenced by her father’s dedication to education — he eventually rejoined the legal profession as a professor and lawyer. At 20, Ajakaiye graduated with a degree in communications and English from the University of Massachusetts and continued to earn credentials from New York University and Cornell University, as she rose through the executive ranks in the retail grocery industry.

During those years, Ajakaiye also was a passionate and committed volunteer, honored by organizations including Big Brothers Big Sisters in Rhode Island for her work with immigrant communities. In 2015, she took a break from her job to earn an MBA in international marketing from Northeastern University in Boston. “Then,” she said, “when I finished that in 2017, I started asking myself: ‘What does giving back look like?’”

One response was to create a platform that would help women connect with the kinds of support that nurtured her and her career, she said. She was conscious of the advantages of the connections and insights that had come from the business conferences she attended as a perk of corporate life, she said. “When I was in those rooms, I left always feeling inspired, but I always thought: ‘Wow, I don’t see enough women have access to this.’”

Ajakaiye convened 17 female friends, all leaders in their fields, and successfully pitched them on the idea of collectively bringing 200 more women together to offer them support. “I didn’t know that day that it would be a women’s conference — I called it a conversation,” she said. “I marched into the Rhode Island Convention Center and said, ‘I want to rent some space.’ I had no idea about things like food and beverage, and all of the overhead that it takes to do a conference, but we figured it out.”

Eight months later, more than 500 women attended the inaugural R.I.S.E. conference in Providence in 2018. By the fifth conference, held both in-person and digitally in September, attendance had almost tripled, with 1,400 women attending the day-long conference, where session topics included financial literacy, entrepreneurship, leadership, wellness, and inclusion. (The conference was held online in 2019, and has offered a digital option along with in-person attendance for the last two years.) R.I.S.E. is a nonprofit enterprise, supported by grants and corporate sponsors, and its organizers, including Ajakaiye, are all volunteers.

“We raise money to give money,” Ajakaiye said, “and to support young women and girls who need us.”

Along with educational sessions on women’s leadership, financial literacy, wellness, mentorship, and entrepreneurship, the R.I.S.E. conference supports women with scholarships and presents awards recognizing outstanding achievements.

‘A Leap of Faith’

Ironically, the conference Ajakaiye founded to pave the way for others proved to be the vehicle that connected her with the next phase of her own career. Ajakaiye met Martha Sheridan, who at the time was president and CEO of Providence Warwick CVB, when both were guests on a radio program in Providence, where Ajakaiye spoke about R.I.S.E. Months later, after Sheridan became GBCVB’s president and CEO, she called Ajakaiye to talk to her about a job helping to lead the organization.

It was a leap of faith to enter a new industry, Ajakaiye said, but she was drawn by Sheridan’s vision of the role that tourism and events can play in mobilizing economic empowerment for individuals and businesses, she said. The hospitality industry is diverse in Boston, a majority-minority city where more than 148 languages are spoken, but not necessarily within its leadership ranks, she said. As the first Black executive at GBCVB, “I’ve used my presence and my face as a Black woman and as a leader within the CVB to be accessible to women and small business owners in Boston’s 23 neighborhoods,” she said. “I am speaking to Black- and brown-owned businesses, and speaking to women-owned businesses,” asking questions about how accessible the CVB and the hospitality industry are to them, she said. “I have 15 to 20 leaders within the city of Boston who are looking to move up, who are managers and above, who want to be the next CEO or GM at a hotel. How do you teach them how to do that? I’ve been really thinking about what does development look like?” she said. “It’s been a passion of mine, just teaching people that the CVB is here to help them out.”

Ajakaiye said that her leadership style is “100-percent focused on inclusion, because I think when you give people opportunities, great things happen. Whether it’s the team at the CVB that we’re building or the volunteer organizers of the R.I.S.E. conference, good change happens when you bring all the stakeholders.to the table. We’re trying to change the narrative of how we lead as people.”

“When you give people opportunities, great things happen,” said GBCVB executive Hilina Ajakaiye, who found supportive mentors as a young immigrant from Ethiopia.

‘Boots out on the Ground’

When Hilina Ajakaiye joined the Greater Boston Convention & Visitors Bureau (GBCVB) in March 2020, she was not only joining an industry that was new to her, but she joined exactly one week before the pandemic shut down the GBCVB offices.

Convene asked Ajakaiye to share her strategy for starting a new job in a new industry in a pandemic:

“I want to tell you that I had this fancy formula, but what I did have was a really committed way of approaching meeting people and developing a network that builds on your network — and really understanding the difference between giving and taking.

“I think you can hear this from anyone who onboarded during the pandemic: I’ve reached out to folks and introduced myself over and over again. And I’ve gotten to know that — whether it’s the mayor, the chief of economic development, or anyone else in the city of Boston who touches our business — everyone is just a phone call or an email away to say, ‘Hey, I see what you’re doing.’

“It’s also putting together some meetings. In 2021, I hosted a luncheon with … those who lead each neighborhood in the city of Boston. I invited 23 of them, including the director of small businesses with the city of Boston. I hosted that to say, ‘I need your buy-in. I want you to support this work.’ We’re hosting a focus group call once a month, then I also do an in-person meeting once a month. I just hired a community liaison manager, but it’s really boots out on the ground. It’s getting out there talking about the initiatives that we have coming up, and also saying: ‘We’re accessible. We want to hear from you.’”

Barbara Palmer is deputy editor of Convene. Ascent is supported by the PCMA Foundation.