The organisation is now in its fifth year, and Drinks International caught up with founder Anna Sebastian.
What are the next steps for Celebrate Her?
It’s been five years since Celebrate Her was set up and became official. It’s obviously changed a lot – since being a group of about 15 of us, now it’s exploded into over 400 people. I think the biggest thing is trying to define what the purpose of Celebrate Her is and was. In lockdown we tried to launch the financial grant programme, which was completely the wrong time, but a bit of naivety and overconfidence – we didn’t realise it wasn’t going to work because we just didn’t have the budget, but we’ll now be looking to launch in Q3.
We want to provide financial grants for women in the hospitality and drinks industry. We’re trying to make the process as simple as possible to apply, so we’re trying to partner with other entities, not just drinks brands, such as Uber and Google Translate. The purpose is to ask people: “What do you need to happen to advance your career in hospitality?” So this could be a course, for example. It has to have an educational element to it and people can apply by form or by video as written English isn’t possible for everyone, and we wanted to make it as inclusive as possible. In the first year we’ll aim to give out five grants – ideally I’d love to do 10.
We’ve also finally decided to be a registered charity in the UK. We’re in the process now with our lawyers to have that set up, so hopefully in the next three to four months we’ll have the charity number which changes the game. A lot of companies can’t give money to a cause unless it has charitable status so this is going to allow us to go to the big companies and get sponsorship. While Celebrate Her is worldwide, to start with we’re going to be doing it region by region. But it’s a really exciting point in the road. Money helps make things happen and one of the biggest barriers is career development as a lot of people don’t stay on, so we want to be able to make it easier and give people the opportunity that they might not have.
Are there any initiatives you’re working on currently?
One thing we lack in the industry is data about who works in it. Everything from ethnicity, gender and religion to what the opportunities or barriers are or people’s thoughts on safety. A lot of the current data is grouped in with things like tourism, but there’s nothing specifically on the drinks industry. So we’ve partnered with CGA, the data company by Nielsen, and Allara Global, which is a training platform that provides online courses, manuals etc. It’s now this huge campaign that we’re launching. The survey itself will take about 10 minutes to do and it’s out now, with the goal to get as many people as possible around the world to fill it out. It will provide us with some incredible resources – not only for us to look at where to focus, but to share with other people. The way we’re doing it with brands is by asking for a donation and that money will go into the Celebrate Her ecosystem and start being able to provide resources for women. I think everything needs to snowball into each other.
What opportunities do you think this will lead to?
I think being able to work with other charities. I don’t know what the future will be, but I’d love to get Celebrate Her to a place where we can invest in other charities, sort of like a charitable trust where we can give money to other smaller entities and support them. There’s lots of opportunity but it’s taking it one step at a time.
What are some of the challenges Celebrate Her has faced?
From the beginning it was kind of how do we go from something really fun and nice to actually taking action? That’s been the biggest thing. Knowing what direction to go in and knowing what purpose is also really hard. Last year it was what do we want to do with this because there are loads of people doing really great things, and it’s not competing, it’s how do we really have impact. A lot of the time we’ve been making decisions based on emotion and what I wanted to do is base these decisions on data as well. One of the biggest reasons women might not stay in hospitality is safety and getting home at night. I can’t go to the government and say women don’t feel safe, I need the figures. So it’s about having these resources and being able to make a proper action plan. I also want to work with UK Hospitality, collaborate resources and build something special to make hospitality a more appealing industry for everyone around the world.
What are some of the current industry challenges you’ve noticed?
One of the biggest universally is sustainability – not everyone wants to work late nights, which is completely fine, but I think there are things that can be put in place. On the financial side, safety is one of the biggest ones and also how do you grow your career? There are limited resources on those next steps, for example, negotiating salaries and who to speak to. There are some really wonderful mentorship programmes but it’s how you tangibly get to the next step. There are also huge challenges with sexism and harassment – it’s about how we combat this, and it comes down to resources and training. It’s about having the right DEI policies in place and this is something a lot of smaller venues won’t have resources for so they have to do it themselves.
The other big challenge is having children – it’s just not a hospitable industry, it’s really tough. I think people don’t discuss or feel like they can’t discuss maternity and paternity leave, it feels like a taboo subject. If people don’t talk about it then there’s no open discussion about what the policies are and the policies tend to not be great.
How can men become involved to help support women in the industry?
Some events are just for women, which is really important because it does create a safe space, but others welcome everyone. We do recognise and think it’s really important to have that change and include men in all of it. I think men are an integral part of this journey but we want to involve men in a different way to how we involve women because we can’t boil an ocean. I think a lot of people feel they have to do everything for everyone and I’ve had people ask, well what about men? I’m happy to give advice and templates so they can have something similar to Celebrate Mothers, as an example, but we can’t spread ourselves too thin. I think education for men is really important, but I think it goes beyond that, it’s more societal – how we speak to each other and how we treat each other. It’s about having the conversations and having men show up. There’s no point in us always doing a panel with women talking back to women, men need to be there as well, so I think it’s breaking down those barriers where men feel they can be part of it.
