GBCVB Guidelines to Ensure Diversity

at Programs, Events & Conferences

The GBCVB is committed to diversity at all our programs, events, and conferences. The GBCVB believes that the ethnicity and diversity of our society and of the visitor industry must be reflective in our speakers and audience. To ensure action we are committing to the following guidelines for all future events. These guidelines pertain to GBCVB Staff and those who are directly representing the GBCVB at conventions, conferences and panel discussions.

At GBCVB events, we will:

• Seek the best and brightest to participate in our programs, regardless of gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, ethnicity, nationality, veteran status, disability, religion or age.

• Not hold any event with an all-male panel during any part of the program agenda.

• Ensure better gender balance, ethnicity, and diversity for our event steering committees to increase the probability of a greater diversity among speakers and attendees.

• Encourage all invited speakers who cannot participate to suggest other potential participants with an eye toward ensuring women and diversity among event speakers.

• Strive for gender balance on all GBCVB event planning committees and consider the inclusion of new members to correct an imbalance.

• Share these guidelines with our leadership team and all Bureau member companies.

• Publish a link and a summary statement of these guidelines on appropriate GBCVB event webpages.

• Seek the opinion of event attendees in post-event surveys about the effectiveness of these guidelines, e.g.; Was our commitment to diversity adequately demonstrated at this event? Did the implementation of the guidelines impact your participation in the event?

• Gather data to measure the diversity of invited speakers, selected speakers, and attendees.

When GBCVB representatives are invited to participate in external events, we will:

• Not participate as a panelist or moderator if the event panel is all-male.

• Strongly encourage the program’s organizers to consider their event’s need for inclusivity and share our events' guidelines with them as a reference tool.

When organizations request GBCVB to partner or co-sponsor their event, we will require the organization to:

• Adhere to the guidelines outlined above. If the organization cannot do so, we would then require written explanation for why they cannot do this, including their plan to meet diversity goals in future years, before GBCVB will agree to partner or co-sponsor the event.

We encourage every organization to consider adopting these guidelines for their own events.

Adopted by the GBCVB Board of Directors 6/19/18.