Representing the Global Majority Affinity Group at the 2024 AMA Conference

I’m back from a wonderful few days in Brighton attending the Arts Marketing Association (AMA) Conference. I attended with Cog colleagues as we were a sponsor of the conference, but I was also there for different reason – to be a speaker representing one of the AMA’s new affinity groups. This was a huge honour that I shared with a fellow Global Majority Affinity Group member, Simone Kelly, Marketing & Communications Manager at Metal.

Before I delve into all the good stuff from our session, it’s important to have context so let’s take a few steps back to October 2023…

What is an Affinity Group?

An affinity group is a space which has been curated for people with similar experiences to come together for healing and strategic aims. Led by Bea Udeh, Head of Diversity at the AMA, they set up their first affinity group in October 2023 for members of the Global Majority.

Who are the Global Majority?

“Global Majority is a collective term that refers to people who are Black, Asian, Brown, dual-heritage, indigenous to the global south, and or have been racialised as ‘ethnic minorities’. Globally, these groups currently represent approximately 80% of the world’s population.”
(Source: Rosemary Campbell-Stephens MBE, Leeds Beckett University)

What does AMA’s Global Majority Affinity Group actually do?

The AMA Global Majority Affinity Group started with a series of salons both online and in person for AMA members from the Global Majority.

These initial salons formed the basis of discussions around what we shared, the support we could provide for each other, what we wanted to get out of being in this group and what we wanted to share with the wider AMA community. You can read Bea’s reflections on the group in this article: Global Majority Affinity Group – the story so far.

After the initial salons, the group met online, continuing to develop, define our purpose and growing as more Global Majority AMA members joined us.

A really important point for me personally was for the AMA Global Majority Affinity group to be visible, for all AMA members to know this group exists and to have some idea of what we do and why we’re here. I suggested the upcoming AMA Conference as the perfect platform for this and thankfully AMA’s Head of Programme Lucy Jamieson was able to find us a slot in the conference schedule.

Planning our session for the AMA Conference

A call-out was made to members of the group to contribute to the AMA Conference session with a clear message that participants would be compensated financially for their time. This is really important, because often Global Majority team members are expected to pick up work like this on a voluntary basis, on top of their already busy workloads and the other disadvantages they are facing in the workplace.

There were two ways to participate – firstly by contributing ideas for what the session should be. This was a 1-hour online session with a wide range of voices from the group. Secondly, the AMA had budget for 2-3 speakers who were offered the AMA conference speaker package which included a speaker fee, tickets to attend both days of the conference and travel expenses paid.

Simone Kelly and I both put ourselves forward and continued planning the session together with support from Bea and Lucy.

Allyship: we have work to do

After calls, emails, shared docs and video meetings, Simone and I finally met in person in Brighton, a few hours before our session. With the friendly AMA team and Brighton Dome tech team we settled in for a runthrough and then the doors to the Old Courtroom opened for our audience to enter the space.

The focus of our session was allyship, knowing this is something that would be relevant to audience members from the Global Majority and to anybody who has Global Majority colleagues, collaborators, contacts and audiences.

We included a selection of scenarios for our audience to discuss with those sat near them and provided suggestions of how to be an ally, being very conscious to state that this session wasn’t about providing definitive “answers” or “solutions”.

I’ve added our slides below and encourage you to have a look through them and in particular to think about the prompts on slides 7-14 and reflect on any instances you have witnessed or experienced yourself.

With our 50-minutes almost up, we ended up racing through one of the positive examples that we wanted to highlight from Walk The Plank. I’d highly recommend reading this article written by Tanica Powell: Walk the Plank’s Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging Journey – marketing, communications and recruitment.

Our session closed with a poem from Simone titled “Intention”. Again, I’d encourage you to have a read through her poem which can be found on slides 26-30. So many lines from this poem resonated with me and my own experiences of choosing to stay in the arts marketing space when it hasn’t always been welcoming to me.

Next steps and aspirations for the future

We came away feeling so proud of the session, it felt like such a positive and hopeful space and we appreciated the comments and sharing from the audiences, especially the Global Majority audience members.

My hope is to see the Global Majority Affinity Group featured again at the 2025 AMA Conference. It’s exciting to think of the different voices that will be picking up the microphone and what they have to say to the wider AMA community.

As we said in our talk, allyship is an ongoing journey, it’s not something you can just do the once and tick off as completed. Your Global Majority colleagues, contacts and peers are living through it every second, every day.

I wanted to add a final thanks to the AMA for setting up the Global Majority Affinity group, to the AMA Conference team for programming us and to Michael and my Cog Design colleagues for allowing me to dedicate some of my usually billable hours to being part of this.