Blue Ridge Pride

Get ready to Swipe Right on your career! Our Business Alliance is proud to sponsor the next WNC Queer Networking event Thursday, February 27th at 5:30 New Belgium Brewing Experience the thrill of "speed networking" where you'll engage in a series of rapid one-one chats with fellow queer professionals, sparking meaningful connections in just minutes. Hosted by the one and only Milo Mawile! This event welcomes all professionals, whether you are a small business owner, artist, performer or looking for new opportunities. Registration is required, here: https://lnkd.in/gKVVAwmu

Blue Ridge Pride, in collaboration with at least 8 other local queer-led/serving organizations, is convening a new (and its first) monthly Advocacy Committee meeting to plan out efforts to defend and uplift our community in political and related arenas. One of our efforts will be to keep our community more informed of what is happening and how we can advocate, individually and together. If you are interested in receiving Advocacy Alerts from us, either via email or text, please sign up at the link below, or scan the QR code here. We believe it is important to be a source of information for our region on legislation and potential actions relevant to the WNC queer community. As we do not have dedicated advocacy staff, and as many local orgs are engaged in some excellent community organizing, we expect many alerts to pass through from other queer-led/affirming organizations. We promise not to spam you, but/and, a lot needs response right now. https://lnkd.in/eYzETtHa

On Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, we honor the legacy of Dr. King, whose fight for equity and justice continues to inspire us. Dr. King preached radical messages of love, maintained a commitment to nonviolence, and championed community networks of support; his actions and sacrifices resonate deeply within the LGBTQIA2S+ community. Dr. King’s relentless pursuit of civil rights reminds us that our fight for equity is interconnected with all global struggles for justice. Today we pause to honor his work and are reminded of our duty to speak truth to power and stand up for all human beings. This Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, we recommit ourselves to the ongoing fight to secure the rights of all marginalized communities by building a world where everyone is treated with dignity and respect.?#MLKDay?#EquityForAll In honor of his legacy, our offices are closed today.?

Blue Ridge Pride is kicking off 2025 in search of an experienced racial equity consultant (5+ years of consulting practice) who can help us advance our work towards our new mission and vision. Specifically, we are looking for someone who will help us with a racial equity audit, an antiracism statement/call to action and priorities for implementation, and advisement on best practices for our programs and events. Thanks to a generous grant from Dogwood Health Trust, we are able to offer living wage+ for this part-time contract; exact hours and scope to be negotiated at signing, length of contract not less than 4 months. Please email a 2-5 page proposal and resume to: [email protected] by February 5th, 2025. We look forward to hearing from you!

Please join the long list of queer-led nonprofits in Asheville for this important post-election Town Hall. We have come together for this event because it is critical for us to work in solidarity in 2025.

Thanks to generous donors and a recent Hurricane relief grant, we are moving into more direct Hurricane relief work, including weekly distribution and 1:1 assistance for LGBTQIA2S+ people impacted by the storm. We are now able to support roughly 50 individuals in Buncombe, Madison or Henderson counties with up to $400 of support, payable to stores, health providers, contractors, etc. Grocery, pharmacy and hardware store gift cards are also options. You can find our application for assistance on our new web page for Hurricane Recovery: https://lnkd.in/eDcRYDKW In our first round of disaster relief, we donated over $1,000 worth of camping/survival equipment to Beloved Asheville and $750 worth of cold weather clothing, including wool socks and thermal underwear, to queer and BIPOC led mutual aid groups including Pansy Collective, Tranzmission, and Southside Community Farms. We are now also working with area tool libraries to make another supply donation of critical needs for clean-up and rehab. We are now accepting applications through our website for volunteers, and will soon be releasing a part-time temp position to help us serve the queer community in the aftermath of Helene. To help us continue this critical work through the long process of recovery, please donate to our Hurricane Helene Recovery Fund here: https://lnkd.in/dEZjAcY2 Thank you!

Nine days ago, a brutal storm that is aptly being compared to Katrina ripped through our entire service area, causing unimaginable damage, and taking with it over 100 people from our region, including members of our queer community. We have received over a dozen messages, most of them from LGBTQIA2S+ organizations outside of the area, asking us where people can donate to help the LGBTQIA2S+ community. There are many queer people on the ground already reaching out to hard-hit areas, including traveling on foot with backpacks full of nonperishable food, flashlights and batteries, and buckets for toilet-flushing. We have decided the best way that we can support at this time is to be a conduit for supplies for these efforts, and, as we get back into our office, distribute supplies as able from our new office in West Asheville (which we had hoped to announce a different way!) We will also use any funds donated to provide mental health support to those affected. To begin these efforts, we have invested $5,000 of our own money and have already purchased our first set of supplies, including coolers, freezer packs, headlamps, charging blocks, lighters, bug spray, buckets, and other survival essentials. This first batch will be donated to BeLoved Asheville on Monday. We will continue to monitor the needs as they change and pivot to providing food, warm clothing, and other essentials through various queer-led efforts. All funds donated at the following will be restricted for relief efforts: https://lnkd.in/em-b9DwV Hurricane recovery will be our primary focus through October, and, if funds allow, will remain a part of our work as long as needed. This recovery effort will take months, and years in some neighborhoods. Thank you for considering supporting our community.

We are just loving seeing all of the pictures and reels from our Blue Ridge Pride Festival on Saturday. The vibe and weather were perfect, the Procession the largest we've had, and for two years in a row no major hecklers. That's what happens when we focus on joy and love vs. hate and division. A tremendous THANK YOU to all of our sponsors, vendors, volunteers, staff and board for putting on an amazing Pride. We hope you met a new friend, enjoyed a new musician, poet or dancer, learned about a cool new resource, and most importantly, we hope we made you smile. Photo dump coming soon. In the meantime, keep up the JOY and LOVE. <3

Awards feel nice :) Especially when you really care about a project/program and the people impacted. Credit goes to our amazing team, and to our prior hostess with the mostest, Tina Madison White

We have a winner for our 2024 Festival logo! This brown fist rising up through the ground, lighted with Pride lanterns through the night, is such a wonderful representation of our theme this year, "Rooted in Liberation". Indeed, it was black and trans activists who led the Stonewall uprising, paving the way for a strong human and civil rights movement for LGBTQIA+ people. Thank you Pendragon Studio for capturing this so beautifully.