Keychange Weeks: Recap

As our live activities were suspended in 2020 (is the sentence I use to start every post now), myself and the team at Keychange had to reconfigure the project’s shape and plans for the year, to ensure that gender representation was still a vital conversation as our industry looked into rebuilding itself post-COVID.

As the Pledge Coordinator at Keychange, my position within this conversation was to ensure that the global music industry were committing to make gender equality, and opportunities for women and gender minorities, a priority in their future plans - ensuring that the music industry on the other side of the pandemic pause would be far more representative than the one that was shut down in March 2020.

To achieve this, I brought a concept called the ‘Keychange Weeks’ to the brilliant team at Keychange, which we collectively built into a series of country-specific, week long focuses, designed to engage global music communities in this important dialogue. This campaign would consist of country specific focus weeks, in which we’d look to ‘recruit’ cross-sector Keychange Pledge signatories as well as new ambassadors and project partners in that territory, all the while engaging the local industry in a contextualised conversation about gender equality.

Keychange has 12 partner countries - and we collaborated with each of these partner countries to execute the Keychange Weeks, bringing more than 150 new pledge signatories and 20 ambassadors on board. As well as expanding the Keychange network, we presented panels, discussions and workshops with each of our country partners, engaging national press in each territory to ensure that this conversation was as loud as possible.

I’m tremendously proud of what the Keychange team achieved throughout this campaign, and very grateful for their patience as one of my ‘easy ideas’ grew into something giant and all-consuming…! If you’d like to find out more, please visit the news, signatory and ambassador sections of the Keychange website for further information.

We’re determined to ensure that the music industry will be working at full strength as soon as possible, and that the industry that we see in the future will be far more representative than the pre-pandemic version.

Stay tuned to Keychange for our next steps.