Over the last few years we have seen some large changes to better realize our organization’s mission. 

Northern Colorado Equality “seeks to empower the LGBTQIA+ community and our allies through activities, programs, services, and education. Honoring, promoting and celebrating our community’s diversity is our central organizing principle.” Starting in 2023 we noticed a few glaring problems with how we conducted our event, and that it was not in line with our mission to empower our community: so we decided to change things. In our effort to support all of Northern Colorado and our community’s diversity we did 2 things:

1. We started rotating our event location between different Northern Colorado cities.
2. We began choosing venues that are primarily indoors.

For a decade our event had been focused on the Fort Collins community and had been largely inaccessible to our disabled community. Pride as a movement focuses on visibility and we acknowledge that moving indoors can take away from that element. At the time, every Pride event in all of Colorado, to our knowledge, was completely outside. We know that many people see the outdoors as a place to be seen and express themselves. For many others, the heat and other challenges with outdoor venues present a barrier. We had members of our own planning committee who couldn’t attend the event they worked hard to create because of the heat. We feel that providing an indoor space for celebration and connection was important to bring more of our community together.

This year, we have made another change to continue our mission: our event has been moved to October for LGBTQ+ history month. We feel this is an important change to help distinguish this event and its mission from the many city-wide celebrations. With the creation of FoCo Pride most cities in Northern Colorado now have their own individual pride event, and with everything happening in our country and the limiting of overall resources there is a deficit of time, money, and volunteers. To support our friends running the local pride events we started looking at moving our event away from the primary Pride season. This gave us the perfect opportunity to think about what our event is focused on and why we do what we do. Our board members unanimously agreed that we want to focus on bringing Northern Colorado together to work towards a brighter future by remembering our history, building community connections, and providing spaces for mutual aid. The move to October will also allow us to expand more of our event outside with less concern for the heat.

We are pleased to invite our community to join us to remember, build, and support together. Together we can stand against any enemy foreign or domestic.