Pembina Valley Pride

Building a grassroots Pride initiative into a sustainable community organization

Founding Board Member | 2019–2026
Chairperson / Project Lead | 2021–2026

At a glance... 

7 years involved in Pembina Valley Pride

2,500+ festival attendees

$16K+ in sponsorship revenue

30–50+ volunteers coordinated

25+ sponsors, vendors & partners

There from the beginning

I joined Pembina Valley Pride when it was still a pretty small grassroots project. Seven years later, I was handing over the Chair position after helping turn it into a festival, a registered nonprofit, and a pretty significant part of the local community. This is all in an environment where Pride was actively discouraged in many different ways. 

I did a little bit of everything along the way.

There were the obvious parts: planning the festival, finding sponsors, coordinating volunteers, managing budgets, booking vendors, writing social media posts, answering emails, and making sure we had enough toilets.

There were also the less obvious parts: figuring out how a volunteer organization should actually function, writing policies, dealing with conflict, responding when things went sideways, deciding when the organization needed to speak up, and occasionally being the person who had to say, "No, we absolutely cannot take that on right now."

I spent five of those seven years as Chair, which meant I got to see the organization through a pretty significant amount of change—from a small local initiative into something much bigger, through COVID, and into the post-pandemic period.

And honestly, I learned a lot.

From a march to a festival

When I joined the organization, Pride was a relatively small community march.

By the time I left, we were putting on a full-day festival that could bring in 2,500+ people.

That growth didn't happen because of one big decision. It was a lot of small decisions, systems, relationships, and increasingly complicated logistics coming together.

I helped plan and coordinate pretty much every part of the event: vendors, performers, volunteers, sponsors, facilities, security, sound, insurance, accessibility, programming, communications, and all the little things that nobody notices unless they're missing.

At our largest, I was coordinating 30–50+ volunteers alongside a much larger network of sponsors, vendors, performers, service providers, municipalities, and community partners.

The event also grew from a roughly $1,000 sponsorship base to more than $16,000 in annual sponsorship revenue.

700 → 2,500+ attendees
$1K → $16K+ sponsorship revenue
30–50+ volunteers
25+ sponsors, vendors & partners

I wasn't just planning Pride. I was helping build the organization.

One of the things I enjoyed most about the role was the work that happened behind the scenes.

As the organization grew, we couldn't keep running it the way we had when it was just a handful of people trying to make a Pride march happen. We needed better systems.

So I helped build them.

That meant developing recurring planning processes, improving documentation, helping establish governance practices, expanding the Board, creating clearer volunteer structures, keeping track of decisions and follow-up, and generally trying to make sure that important information didn't live exclusively inside someone's head.

I also spent a lot of time figuring out how to balance what we wanted to do, what our community needed, and what a volunteer organization could realistically handle.

That last part was probably one of the most important lessons I took from the experience.

Fundraising, sponsorships, and figuring out how to pay for everything

Pride costs money.

A lot of money, actually.

I helped build our sponsorship program from the ground up, including developing sponsorship packages, approaching potential sponsors, maintaining relationships, negotiating in-kind support, managing recognition and deliverables, and figuring out which opportunities actually made sense for us.

We grew annual sponsorship revenue from approximately $1,000 to more than $16,000, while also bringing in funding through grants, merchandise, drag shows, and other community fundraising.

I learned pretty quickly that fundraising isn't just asking people for money. It's relationship-building, figuring out what you can genuinely offer someone, communicating why the work matters, and knowing when an opportunity isn't worth the trade-off.

Sometimes the answer really was just, "This would bring in money, but it's not worth what we'd have to give up to get it."

When things went sideways

Some of the most useful experience I got from Pride came from the moments when things absolutely did not go according to plan.

Making lemonade

The most memorable was probably when our Pride billboard was vandalized.

I helped lead the communications response and got something out within about 48 hours. The response ended up receiving national attention, and we sold nearly 200 pieces of merchandise in three weeks. We wound up selling shirts in two physical locations, too - including McNally Robinson Book Sellers in Winnipeg. 

That wasn't because we had some enormous communications department. We didn't.

It was because we had to figure out what to say, how quickly we needed to say it, what we wanted people to take away from it, and how to respond without allowing the incident to become the entire story.

There were plenty of other difficult moments, too -threats directed at event vendors, political controversy, community conflict, board disagreements, and situations where we had to make decisions with incomplete information.

Those experiences taught me that leadership isn't always about having the perfect answer.

Sometimes it's about staying calm, figuring out what matters most, and making the best decision you can with what you have.

Making Pride actually accessible

Accessibility was something I cared about throughout my time with Pride, and I tried to treat it as part of planning rather than something we remembered at the end.

That meant things like sensory-friendly spaces, accessible facilities, alternate routes, free water, first aid and mental-health supports, ASL interpretation where feasible, and thinking about how people with different disabilities and access needs would actually experience the event.

It also applied to our communications.

I used alt text and captions, considered colour contrast and readable typography, used plain language where appropriate, and thought about how information would work for people using screen readers.

More importantly, I learned not to assume I knew what people needed.

Some of our best decisions came from listening to people with lived experience and letting them tell us what would actually make participation easier.

I also made a lot of the stuff people actually saw.

I designed merchandise, event graphics, social media graphics, and other public-facing materials throughout my time with Pride. When our billboard was vandalized, I photographed the damage and turned the image into a graphic that could work on shirts and other merchandise. I also handled the digital side of getting the merchandise online—uploading products, setting up variations, making sure designs worked across different products and colours, and keeping the storefront organized and functional.

The billboard campaign was a good example of how all those pieces of the job overlapped. I wasn't the person who originally designed the billboard, but when something unexpected happened, I could take what we had, figure out how to turn it into something useful, and get it out into the world quickly.

When replacing Pride flags became a fundraising project

One June, Pride happened to overlap with a local federal byelection. Maxime Bernier was campaigning heavily in the area, and we started hearing from people whose Pride flags had been stolen from their homes and businesses.

Rather than asking people to keep replacing their own flags, we decided to do something about it. We organized an initiative to replace stolen Pride flags for free for community members who wanted one.

I helped organize the initiative and the fundraising behind it. The community responded by donating approximately $750, which allowed us to replace the flags without putting the cost back onto the people whose flags had been stolen.

It was a pretty simple project, but I think it says a lot about the kind of community work I like: notice a problem, figure out what would actually help, and then make it happen. I was also responsible for delivering the replacement flags, which gave me the chance to build relationships with some really cool people.

The part I probably learned the most from

Pride taught me that good plans are only useful if people can actually carry them out.

A volunteer organization doesn't have unlimited time, money, or people. You can't solve every problem by adding another meeting or asking somebody to work harder.

So a lot of my job became figuring out where structure would actually help.

What needed a process?
What needed a spreadsheet?
What needed a policy?
What needed a conversation?
What could wait?
And, perhaps most importantly, what did we simply not have the capacity to do?

I got very comfortable moving between the strategic and the extremely practical. One minute I could be talking about organizational governance or the year's priorities; the next I could be figuring out where the portable toilets were going.

I actually like working that way.

I like big-picture thinking, but I also like making the thing work.

What this actually involved

Project management

Planning, timelines, workstreams, logistics, risk management and delivery

Organizational leadership

Governance, Board development, decision-making and organizational planning

Communications 

Public messaging, advocacy, crisis communications, social media and stakeholder communications

Fundraising 

Sponsorships, grants, merchandise, community fundraising and relationship development

Community engagement 

Partnerships, volunteers, public outreach and advocacy

Accessibility 

Inclusive event design, accessible communications and lived-experience-informed planning