The 2020 BroadcastHER Virtual Summit
On October 17–18, 1000 Dreams Fund (1DF) hosted its first BroadcastHER Virtual Summit. The Summit was focused on elevating the stories and expertise of the women who are involved in the gaming and tech scene. 1DF hosted the event as a part of its mission to provide resources to women so that they can pursue their dreams. This summit was in part associated with the BroadcastHER grant that they offer. The grant is open to women broadcasters on Twitch, those who apply can receive up to $2,000 to put towards conferences, equipment upgrades, and personal development courses. The deadline for the fall grant is November 20th, so if you’re a streamer on Twitch and identify as a woman, please apply! I am a Spring 2020 recipient of the grant. Trust me when I say, apply even if you don’t think you have a chance. Don’t write yourself out of amazing opportunities, take the risk.
Over the course of the two-day summit, viewers were treated to a variety of panels that covered networking, building a brand, and diversity and inclusion within the gaming and esports community. Eunice Chen and Dr. Kishonna L. Grey presented keynote presentations to open and close the summit. Chen spoke on the need to pursue inner happiness and Dr. Grey spoke on how far we’ve come and where we still need to go. Both keynotes offered a positive look on the future of women in gaming and esports. Today, we’ll be covering just a couple of the panels. These are the ones that stood out to me and that I’ll definitely revisit in the future to see how they affected my content creation journey.
Building Your Brand
Krystalogy moderated this panel of 5 women, Storymodebae, Ashnichrist, SirKatelyn, MischaCrossing, and negaoryx. The point was to talk about how you not only build your brand but how you can shift and change your brand into something that better fits you as a creator. The key takeaway that I had from this panel was when StoryModeBae said focus on your own content. While the entire panel was great, almost every answer came back to that statement. If you don’t focus in on what you want for the content that you’re creating, you’ll never really get to where you want to be. It’s easy as content creators to see all the progress that others around us are making and fall into feeling that we’ll never be as good as others. The beauty in content creation is that we don’t have to be like anyone else, nor should we. People will ultimately come into our streams because they vibe with us. Focusing on your own content opens up opportunities for you to reflect on the areas that you need to grow, but also to see how far you’ve come. Building a brand starts with you defining what you want to be known for, focus on that.
Inclusion and Diversity
This was the panel that I was most looking forward to. It was moderated by Mad_Madame_Em and featured YoBrandii, PleasantlyTwisted, and Mojo_Jojo97 (Mojo). Their conversation was insightful as it offered a look into the gaming and esports community that isn’t often highlighted at conferences. They spoke frankly on what it’s like to be a content creator online, which was refreshing. YoBrandii said that there needs to be more panels that feature all BIPOC that don’t have to deal with diversity, inclusion, or equity.
This was important for us to hear because the trend for diversity and inclusion now is based on optics. Companies, esports teams, and content creation platforms like to have visual representation for BIPOC, but it feels like the representation that comes to BIPOC is always centered on diversity and inclusion. In order for us to make more progress in gaming and tech, we’ve got to have panels that are made up of BIPOC talking about the newest tech, the games that they love playing, the products their creating, or even the content they are consuming. It’s disheartening to constantly be featured at conferences only to have to present the same topic time and time again. Moving forward, I think that these panelists were onto something. We have to broaden the scope of what speaking opportunities that are offered to BIPOC, we’re tired of speaking only on diversity and inclusion. Let us show off our other loves as well.
Overall this panel was a joy to watch. It was a reminder of all the work that we’ve done and everything that’s still to come. I’m looking forward to the day when Black women, in particular, can just create and exist and not have to be strong like YoBrandii said.
The Summit
Overall, I was very happy to attend the summit. I felt like it was a worthwhile way to spend my weekend and I was grateful to 1DF for hosting it. It was exciting getting to see different panelists get to talk about topics that are important to them. Hearing speakers’ passions come through always changes the impact of the words that are shared and it was excellent to get to hear from so many incredible women who were able to share their experiences and expertise.
I’m hoping that this Summit is not the only one that 1DF will offer. Next year I would love to see them feature even more BIPOC as speakers and to make sure that all panelists are given an equal opportunity to speak. At times, the panels felt dominated by one or two panelists. It would be good to train the moderators of the conversation on how to direct questions at certain people to make sure that all participants have a chance to lend their expertise for a particular question. I would also love to see them offer more in terms of accessibility. During the stream, there wasn’t an option to have captions that I saw. As more and more people tune into live streams, I think that it’s important to add more accessibility options.
If you’re interested in learning more about 1DF, you can check out their website by clicking here. Also, if your a broadcaster who identifies as a woman on Twitch, you should also consider applying to receive the BroadcastHER Grant. Like I said before, give yourself a chance to receive the grant.
