NW PA Pride Thanks 2017 Donors

by NW PA Pride Alliance

Thanks to donors and supporters , 2017 was a great year for the NW PA Pride Alliance. We celebrated 25 years of pride this year and embraced this milestone as our theme. With this added focus on the history of the local LGBTQIA community, we honored six groups and one individual with Visibility Awards at Pridefest for their work over the past 25 years.

With accessibility in mind, the board made changes to our marquee summer events, moving Pridefest to the last weekend in June and the Pride Picnic to the final weekend in August. In addition to the new date, Pridefest had a new location-the freshly renovated Perry Square. Because of these changes, we attracted roughly 750 people, the largest pride event in NWPA history. And for the second year in a row, Erie Pridefest was covered by MIC Media as part of the Google-sponsored "Small Town, Big Pride" series.

We also continued to focus on increasing the visibility of NWPA Pride, building connections to community partners and promoting issues important to the LGBTQIA community. We participated in the first-ever Erie County HIV Awareness Walk. We marched in the Edinboro University Homecoming Parade with Identity, Edinboro University's LGBTQIA student organization. We locked arms with our allies in the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial March and we participated in the annual Fourth of July Parade in Millcreek. We also continued our partnership with the Erie Seawolves for "Pride Night at the Erie Seawolves." We partnered with The Zone Dance Club on two events-the annual Miss Erie Pageant and Painting with Pride. We donated gift baskets for National Night Out in Gridley Park and hosted the third annual Pride Day at Waldameer Park and Water World.

We are already hard at work planning for 2018 with the goal of building on the growth we enjoyed in 2017, but we cannot do it without the support of our donors and our community partners. We thank you again for your continued support and we look forward to seeing you in 2018 at Pridefest on June 30th and the Pride Picnic on August 11th.