CHLA California Lodging News November/December 2022

10 CALIFORNIA LODGING NEWS www.calodging.com CHIEF OF DIVERSITY, EQUITY, AND INCLUSION THE PAST FEW YEARS HAVE created a more intensive focus on DEI—Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion—across industries and communities throughout the state. Visit Sacramento has taken its commitment to the next level, creating a new position dedicated to DEI, naming its former chief marketing officer, Sonya Bradley, as the first Chief of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion last April. For Bradley, it was a new experience both personally and within the industry. “I took this role knowing it didn’t exist in other DMOs on the West Coast,” she said. “Big corporations have people in this role, a lot of times in the HR department, but it has never really been talked about in our industry.” The organization’s President and CEO gave Bradley a free hand to design and develop the role, in the wake of a number of high-profile killings of Black people by police. “The May 2020 death of George Floyd opened up a lot of discussion here about racial equity,” Bradley said. “It drove us to see what we were doing as an industry and an organization.” At the same time, Visit Sacramento was dealing with the pandemic shutdown and its effect on the city’s tourism industry. There was a huge need to find ways to help hotels, restaurants, and cultural activities survive the economic losses—and the organization knew that would extend across the entire city. As a result, Bradley led a move to extend the organization’s focus from the downtown/ midtown core, home to conventions and the majority of hotels, to neighborhoods beyond. Visit Sacramento began to create or strengthen ties with neighborhood groups, improvement districts, and local DEI committees, connecting with them one-on-one to understand the vast range of cultural and neighborhood resources available to visitors. Bradley said that Visit Sacramento saw that as both a way to make the organization more inclusive as well as create a different and more diverse visitor experience. “A lot of DMOs focus on downtown or midtown, but your community is much more than that, and we wanted to figure out SonyaBradley “A lot of DMOs focus on downtown or midtown, but your community is much more than that, and we wanted to figure out how we can get more of our city involved in tourism and share our broader cultural resources.”

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