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In this episode of Connected Thinking, JR, Group Account Director at SEEN Connects, sits down with Rain Reeta Loi, Writer, Music Artist, Founder of Gaysians and multi-award-winning activist.From building purpose-led communities to campaigning for LGBTQ+ rights in India, Rain brings a unique perspective on culture, representation and the future of brand building.
As brands continue investing in community-led marketing, our conversation explores what genuine community-building looks like, why marginalised groups drive culture, and how brands can create more meaningful, long-term impact through representation.
You founded Gaysians, a community-centred, purpose-led platform, after 15 years leading agencies and brands. Tell us how that came about.
I'd been working on campaigns at major brands for many years and I didn't see myself reflected in any of those campaigns. Shoot after shoot, job after job, there was never anyone like me. That was really reflected in what I was seeing in wider media. I didn't see anyone like me on TV or in magazines or in books, and I didn't see anyone like me in queer spaces or media either. I'd been out for 20 years and I got to the point where I felt I had to be that person, because no one else was going to do it for me.
I started Gaysians because I wanted a space where we could tell our own stories. I wanted a space that was for us, that was a support service, and something that helps us find support services available for mental health, housing, trans support, youth support, anything we might need that was quite hard to access at the time. I also wanted to create a space where we could tell our own stories, because working with media platforms, there was always somebody who wasn't from our communities asking us the questions. It wasn't our lens that we were speaking through, or seen through, or that our stories were told through.
At the time I was working within agencies, with the Red Bull Media House team, and they had just revolutionised the way advertising worked. It was massive. I learned a lot about how we could create huge impact with much smaller budgets, because the question at the time was how to get as much reach as possible while reducing advertising spend. That was really through using digital partnerships and media partnerships, and that space was exploding. So that was the business model I built Gaysians on. It was a partnerships platform that utilised media, digital platforms and social media to reach as much of our community as possible. It grew really rapidly and became a global brand quite quickly. Working on our own storytelling within the media, creating pathways for people as well as building engagement, has really changed the landscape for our communities, but LGBTQ+ South Asians specifically, for generations.
Building communities is a bit of a buzzword in marketing at the moment. Can brands actually build genuine community, or is it just a well-packaged campaign?
I absolutely believe brands can build communities. If we look at what community actually means, it literally means a group of people who have something in common, who share an identity. But when we use the word community, we're often talking about something more than that. We're talking about something intentional and cultivated that shares a purpose. There's an intention behind why we're grouping these people together, and there's usually an initiative or an aim that the community wants, especially because we tend to use the word community when we're looking at underrepresented or marginalised groups.
The way I've personally experienced brands and community working most effectively together was 20 years ago, when I was working within an agency and I started bringing in charity clients and community clients we would partner with to develop revenue-generating campaigns. They were charities that aligned with my values, that I was happy to add to my client list and that also aligned with our brand. As an agency, that really helped us root into what we were about as well. It's a model I took into every place I worked, which at the time was not always something the CEO of every business was happy about, because I was saying, "I'm going to bring in a charity client or a community organisation and these are not going to be billable hours." But the benefit of working that way really helps motivate internal teams. It helps you deliver something beyond the financial or commercial goals of the organisation.
There's a lot in that when we're looking at our own individual purpose. HR Review recently published that 97% of people have better mental health outcomes if they're working towards a purpose, and we can't really deny that. Having done that in every place I'd worked, when I came to developing my own purpose-led organisation, it was a natural flow. That's exactly the model we need today. I would love it if Gaysians had brand, agency or media partners who worked with us in the long term, where we could align on our goals, because accessing community, especially from underrepresented groups, has a really lasting impact on the way our communities will feel about that brand.
What matters is the long-term outcome we want to achieve. We're seeing rights and funding rolled back across community organisations and individuals, so what are the ways that brands can step in and fill those gaps? From a commercial perspective there are so many benefits, and it just takes some really courageous brands to start shifting the landscape.
What do brands still fundamentally not understand about working with creators from marginalised groups or communities?
Our communities are so loyal. When you haven't seen yourself reflected and then you do, the joy in that is just something else. If you haven't experienced that, I don't think you're ever going to fully understand it. But if you belong to a group that's a person of colour group or an LGBTQ+ group or any other marginalised group, you have never seen yourself reflected in the way that we should be. We're still in that time where we're not seeing ourselves reflected as we should be.
If I just speak about the South Asian community alone, we're the largest ethnic minority group in the UK, and we're not reflected in media as we should be. Creatively, we don't receive the opportunities we should anywhere. So when we see ourselves reflected and someone from our community shows up for us, we're so loyal to that brand. We will fight to the death for that brand. We are so loyal to that brand forever. That brand is in our good books, and that sentiment permeates across the community.
The brand loyalty achieved within underrepresented groups by working with our talent is massive. It's off the chart, and I don't think brands realise that yet. We're not fickle consumers, we're loyal consumers. When a brand aligns with us, we stick with that brand, and our families stick with it, our children stick with it, our social circles stick with it. It's a lifetime commitment that we make. And in terms of driving culture, we're absolutely driving culture, increasingly so. That's only going to become a bigger thing, so brands that align with us now are really going to benefit.
The creator economy is often framed as empowering, but where do you think it's still replicating the same inequalities we've seen in traditional media?
As long as there is systemic oppression and inequality, and we live in a hierarchical system where there is white supremacy, patriarchy, cisheteronormativity, any system designed to create inequities between human beings, we will always find that come up in whatever we create. Whatever technology we create, whatever platform we create, whatever organisation we create, will always have that exist within it, because we are living within it and amongst it, and that's what we take into our work. We take everything we experience outside of work into our work, and there's no switch off from that, unfortunately.
This is why I have been working on something new that's designed to challenge and address that, that works underneath the more strategic levels I tend to work with organisations. Usually I'll go into a brand or an agency and work with them to develop strategies: how do we improve our hiring strategies, how do we challenge inequities within the workplace, how do we shift unconscious bias?
How have your identities shaped your career, and how do they shape it today?
I used to really feel like my identities were a hindrance to my career. I used to feel like it was always working against me to be someone who was assigned female at birth, someone who was a person of colour, someone who was queer. I was always the only person in the room with my identities, and the higher I moved up the ladder in any organisation, the more extreme that was. Sitting around a boardroom table and always being the only voice coming from a certain perspective, there's a choice that I think we often have to make, which is an alignment towards the culture of the organisation. Back then, agencies were just full of, it was an old boys' club type of setup. For me to succeed, I would have to align with that culture. But I was always looking at ways I could bring my own values into those spaces, whether that was working with charities, or hiring people who were really outside of the usual type of hires the organisation would make, and developing them into the best they could possibly be. I got so much from that.
The more time I've spent in communities I share identities with, whether that's been LGBTQ+ media or working with South Asian creatives, I've felt like I am living my purpose more. I found purpose within those spaces. Over time, there's been an integration of my work and my identities and the spaces I'm in. There's been a merging of that, which is such a beautiful experience. I'm so grateful for it, and I want everyone to experience that, because we don't have to be so siloed. There's a disconnect for most of us in terms of what's going to work and the role we're playing at work versus who we are and what our identities are.
But for me, the most important piece is what my values are. Values are the most important thing, much more important to me than identities. I connect with people based on values. Identities is really not the number one priority for me, and I had to learn that, because for a long time I really felt like I needed people I shared identity with, because I didn't have that. I didn't have a community of South Asian LGBTQ+ people for most of my life. I had to seek those people out, and when I met them, it was amazing and I really needed that. But I also had to learn that values are the thing that drive me most. If you share values, none of the rest of it really matters. It's a more heart-to-heart connection.
Tell us about the RAIN Framework. What's it all about, and why have you developed something that helps others align with their purpose?
This is actually the first time I'm sharing the RAIN Framework publicly. I've been sharing it directly with businesses, and it's a workshop programme that I'm working with businesses to share internally. It's been about two and a half years of developing the programme with organisations and leading agencies.
The RAIN Framework came about when I was in India a few years ago, spending time with friends I considered my chosen family and had known for many years. I was also on a personal healing journey, and I shared my they/them pronouns and my new gender-fluid name, which were real sources of celebration for me. I was met with hostility, and that really surprised me. What I realised was that I can do all the healing I want, but if I step outside my home and I'm not safe, then what's the point? I need everybody to get on board.
So I came up with the RAIN Framework as something that is for everybody. Unlike most of my work, which has been primarily for LGBTQ+ communities, South Asian communities, or South Asian LGBTQ+ communities, I wanted to create something for everybody, because we all need each other. I need you to get on board with this. I need you to help me feel safe.
RAIN stands for Recover, Awaken, Imagine, Now. It's a four-step framework rooted in my Buddhist values, but also in my creativity and my work as an artist, my time in business and my time in activism. It brings together the best of my learnings from all of these spaces. The core premise is really about sharing tools so you can develop your own self-practice that's designed to help you have better mental health and challenge your own self-talk. When we're talking about unconscious bias, it's about bringing to the forefront what thoughts I'm having and how to dispel those thoughts as an ongoing practice. We are constantly being fed lies and mistruths about people who are different from us, and we're also picking up that information about ourselves. We have internalised homophobia, internalised racism. We're absorbing all these things that are making us not love ourselves, and making us mistrust each other and not feel safe with each other.
For me, it's about how we retrain our minds to have better mental health outcomes, speak more lovingly to ourselves, and have more compassion and kindness for each other. I share practices and tools for journaling and creativity so we can really access that, so it becomes a part of us. These are simple tools I use myself, that I've been developing and using for the last 25 years, and I've been increasingly asked to share elements of them, so I've packaged it all together.
The last part is Now, which is about being really present, because anxiety lives in our fear of the future, and depression lives in our inability to let go of the past. When we're present, it's so powerful, and it's so rare that we're able to do that. Being really present, and actually taking action from here, is the final piece. That's about: what is my story? How do I know what my purpose is? How do I align with it? There's a thread that runs all through these four elements to help us arrive at that purpose.
Doing that work with organisations and seeing individuals really thrive in that is so rewarding, because people are showing up in their work in more meaningful ways and feeling so much more meaning and purpose in the work they're doing. They might also say, "I'd actually really like to bring this project into the work that I do," or "I'd really like to work in that team over there." There's so much individual growth that happens within an organisation that the culture of the organisation changes. We need that to happen on an individual basis.
This is my way of offering something in a work environment, because I truly believe that the workplace is now the only place where we really meet people who are different from us. We don't have community spaces, we don't have community centres, we don't have libraries; not everybody goes to the pub, especially now. The spaces where we can actually spend time with people who are different from us, and who challenge our thinking, are shrinking, especially after spending time in a bubble of six people who shared the same ideas as us in the pandemic.
Favourite book or podcast you'd recommend?
Please read Caste by Isabel Wilkerson. The reason that book is important is because Isabel Wilkerson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, and she's written a book about India's ancient caste system, which is one of our oldest systems of oppression. She joins the dots between that and other systems of global oppression. It's really important that we understand all of this is linked and designed.
If that sounds a bit heavy, I'd also recommend reading anything by Arundhati Roy. If you want fiction, The God of Small Things will change your life, but any of her work is absolutely stunning. She's my favourite author. And if you want something a little easier to get into, then The Good Immigrant, edited by Nikesh Shukla, is a fantastic starting point to understand different identities, especially of people of colour in the UK.
Best piece of advice you've received?
The best piece of advice I was given was by Max, my dearest friend and Buddhist mentor, and it's this simple: "shine, babe."
The reason that's important is that for many of us, particularly activists and people working in a space of purpose, there's a tendency to lose sight of our own joy and happiness in the course of our work. That certainly happened to me. The work becomes so big that we forget we're also part of the community. So that's a reminder to also tend to our own light and our own joy, and to choose the things that bring us happiness as well. From that place, we can do our best work anyway. But also, you matter too. You're just as important as everybody else. So just shine, babe.
