After two virtual conferences during the pandemic, Black Girls in Media has successfully wrapped up its very first in-person conference in Atlanta, marking a huge milestone for the organization. Founder Tahsa McCaskiel joins News Wrap to discuss.

Cheddar's News Wrap

Preparing Black Women to Achieve the Career of Their Dreams

Welcome back to news wrap One organization is on a mission to help black girls break into the media industry and make connections along the way After two virtual conferences during the pandemic black girls and media has just successfully wrapped up. Its very first in person conference in Atlanta, marking a huge milestone for the organization. And joining me now to discuss is founder Tasha Macaskill. Tasha, thank you so much for joining us. Welcome to the show. Before we get to that conference, I want to talk about black girls in media. It's been around since 2018. What was your inspiration behind creating this brand? Yes, well for one, thank you all for having me. Um so really my inspiration was to help other women deal with what I was dealing with at the time. Um I had just graduated from grad school trying to find a full time opportunity and it was just really challenging. So I created a group chat to help other women network, see how we can help each other any opportunities available and the group chat just grew from there and that's how we got started. Now, as you mentioned, you built this brand with the idea of creating a community. How important is it to have a sense of community in an industry like media. Oh, it's super important, you know, community breeds connection especially, you know, during the pandemic in 2020 that's when I got into, you know, doing virtual events because um community is a place where we can feel seen, we can feel supported and that is really what I strive to um focus on when it comes to black girls in media now. What kinds of programs and tools does black girls in media have in place to assist black women in breaking into the industry. For sure. Yeah, so we have our membership, so our membership, we do monthly programs, we have different guest speakers on there that can teach anything from, you know, how to create a media rail, to how to tailor your resume. We also do um not only virtual events, but we do in person events like our conference that we just had, but also small gatherings and networking events. Um we also partner with corpora to help them share their job openings with our community as well, so we definitely do job caring for our audience um and we just, you know, share really useful tools on our instagram account which has over 80,000 followers and growing what sorts of success stories do you have from members who actually succeeded in breaking into the industry and getting that career of their dreams? Oh my goodness. So we started seeing success stories as soon as possible as soon as I created the group chat, I started had young woman individually messaging me saying, you know, hey I just got an internship or hey I have this interview coming up. Um so that's really, you know, the results started Coming up as soon as I created the group and then, so now, you know, to this day we provided over, you know, like 100 jobs to black women in the media industry? And I'm still growing. That's always so good to hear. I want to talk about your personal journey now to what has the world been like for you and how has it helped you with building this first huge in person event? Yeah, so I would say at first it was hilarious because I started this group to help uh really myself, you know, get insight on how to get an opportunity and everyone in the group was getting opportunities and I'm just like, hey, don't forget about me. Um and then so, you know, in return, I've just been really supported when it comes to my career, I have an entertainment background um when it comes to my personal career. And so, you know, my most recent opportune I've had a past speaker of black girls in media event, you know, share a role with me um in los Angeles California media role and I said, hey, yeah, of course, like instead of, you know, I'm going to share it with my audience, but also I'm gonna apply as well and um yeah, so when it comes to being in the media industry, a lot of my roles have been received and gotten from our past on along from, you know, a black woman, a colleague of mine, I think so many women can likely relate to struggles of entering the media industry. Now, I want to talk about your in person event versus your virtual event. What was the difference and what challenges did you notice in setting up this in person event versus doing these digital events that you start out with? Yeah, so I would say I feel like the virtual people event was kind of practice because I wanted to, you know, create a sense of community, like we talked about when it came to the pandemic, people were striving to connect and so, you know, seeing how I planned the virtual conference, you know, everything from the sketch and picking speakers and very being very intentional about that. It was a lot of practice and I did the same thing for the in person conference. The only difference was of course, you know, dealing with decor and venue and things like that, but overall the impact was exactly the same. Now, speaking of that impact, what are some of the feedback that you received about the conference this year? It was overwhelming. I'm still getting notifications on my phone of you know, women that attended creating reels creating instagram stories, sharing stories of their experience, all positive as you can see, you know, we had over 200 women there. Um you know, women, I've been reaching out to me every day saying, you know, they made connections, they got over their fear about networking. They, you know, have just made lifelong friends from the weekend. So the feedback has just been positively overwhelming. I'm so excited. We definitely set out to create a community, it looks like in that clip you definitely succeeded. So what's next for black girls in media? Yeah, what's next is partnering with even more companies to help hire, especially when it comes to reaching their diversity needs. Um you know, believe it or not in 2020 to a lot of companies are still striving to hit those thresholds when it comes to have an equal opportunity. So I want to make sure we keep partnering with these corporations, make sure they're hiring from our community hiring these qualified black women in the media fields. Um so we want to keep doing that. We want to do even larger scale events, so that's on the up and up and um you know, just still providing valuable content on social media and also in our in person events and just taking it up another level. Tasha, thank you so much for joining us so many exciting things to watch from you in the future. No doubt, we'd love to have you back on. That's Tasha Macaskill, founder of Black Girls in Media, to learn more about the organization. Head over to Black Girls in Media inc dot com