How to Organize Inclusive Events and Conferences

Make your next event even more special—and accessible

The ultimate guide to creating welcoming, safe, and accessible gatherings for everyone. With detailed strategies and illustrative examples, How to Organize Inclusive Events and Conferences uses principles of design justice to share how to put on truly inclusive occasions built for the needs and abilities of all. If you’ve ever attended or hosted conferences, organize events for fun or for a living, or if you have ever thought, “I guess these spaces just aren’t made for me and I wish I could change that,” this book is written for you! 

Expert events organizer Alex D. Ketchum provides the ethical framework of what true inclusion in action means, considering a broad variety of identities and experiences such as economic hardship, childcare needs, racial and ethnic identities, disabilities, neurodivergence, and more. Whether you’re hosting an academic symposium, an activist meeting, a feminist zinefest, or a comics con, Ketchum offers a step-by-step guide through the planning and execution process, with useful tips, timelines, and templates along the way. This book is an indispensable companion to building events and conferences from an ethic of care, allowing us to cultivate authentic community and to create the better world we desire—together.

Keep reading for an excerpt of Alex D. Ketchum’s How to Organize Inclusive Events & Conferences, shipping now from our site and available to order through your favorite purveyors of indie books!

Have you ever wanted to organize a public event? Do you dream of hosting a battle of the bands, film screenings, concerts, poetry readings, art shows, teach-ins, lectures, seed exchanges, zine workshops, and panels? What about a conference? Maybe you already have experience doing this work but you have noticed that inequities from the society-at-large are replicated at your events, despite best intentions.

The goal of this book is to provide event and conference organizers of all levels with the tools to make their events accessible, sustainable, and rooted in social justice principles. Whether you are new to organizing or highly experienced, this book will provide frameworks and practical tips to create inclusive events. No matter the kind of event or conference you are interested in organizing, whether large or small, online, in-person, hybrid, synchronous, or asynchronous, this book includes what you need to know. From the smallest details (such as what to have in your bag on the day of the gathering) to large topics (such as choosing a location, selecting presenters, funding, designing publicity materials, working with community partners, etc.)

This book draws on my experience organizing hundreds of public events, including:

• 100+ events for Disrupting Disruptions: The Feminist and Accessible Publishing, Communications, and Tech Hybrid Speaker and Workshop Series
• Several conferences, including:
  • Queer Food Conference (Boston and Montréal)
  • Food, Feminism, and Fermentation Conference
  • Circuits de consommation, a food, feminism, and technology conference
• Multiple Feminist Research Colloquiums

I have also organized concerts, book launches, pumpkin festivals, sports tournaments, dances, parties, potlucks, podcasting workshops, film screenings, rallies, marches, and parades. As both an organizer and attendee, I have paid attention to what worked, what did not work, and what could be improved. I will also share insights from other event organizers, disability justice activists, feminist educators, and queer designers.

How we do the work is the work. In this book, I hope to help you organize events and conferences that reflect the ethos that inspired your event in the first place. We will explore how decisions over signage, outreach, website design, food, pricing, venue, technology, and so much more can foreground queer, feminist, accessible, socially just, and inclusive principles. This book will help you host an event or conference in which everyone who takes part feels included, supported, and valued!

This book begins in Part 1 by exploring the foundations of inclusive event and conference organizing. Part 2 focuses on event organizing. Much of the content in Part 2 informs Part 3, which focuses specifically on conference planning. Part 4 focuses on your needs as an organizer.

One other note: Part 2, the section on events, can inform your conference organizing decisions . . . because conferences are, in essence, a series of smaller events, grouped together.

While each section of the book builds on the next, I encourage you to flip to different sections as they are most useful for you. Templates for your event and conference organizing are distributed throughout the book. If your phone has word detection capabilities, you can turn your camera app on and select the text so you can use the templates more readily. Adjust them to your needs.

Finally, although I may mention certain applications and software, technology is ever-evolving. I encourage you to focus more on the technological capabilities of any tool (whether paper, email, computer software, or a phone app) and how they can serve the values of your conference rather than the exact software I discuss.

This book contains information that will help guide your decisions to ensure that your event is inclusive and reflects your goals and values.

Let’s get organizing!

Build your own inclusive gathering with the help of Alex D. Ketchum’s How to Organize Inclusive Events & Conferences, now available direct from Microcosm or available to order at a shop near you!