Welcome to Boston Pride Week!

Boston Pride Week 2015 is right around the corner, and the Boston Pride team is #wickedproud to unveil what we have in store for you this year. We anticipate the 2015 celebration to be our biggest yet.

We’d like to thank the entire Boston Pride Committee as well as our volunteers, sponsors and partners, community supporters, and Friends of Boston Pride for their work and financial contributions, which make Pride a reality every year.

The 2015 theme is “45 th Anniversary - #WickedProud”. Its twofold structure evokes the storied history of Pride in Boston and provides a distinctively Bostonian motto around which our community can rally. Boston Pride was born in 1970, one year after the Stonewall Riots. From a small march in 1971 with speeches between Jacques Cabaret and City Hall, to over 40 events, including a fourhour parade illustrating our community’s diversity and richness, Boston Pride has grown immensely; it is now the largest annual public event in New England! We are proud to continue the tradition of public demonstration in the streets of Boston, as well as to offer numerous other events intended for everyone to enjoy and to celebrate who they are, in a safe and fun environment.

In addition to Boston Pride’s commitment to a legacy of public events, we also work year-round to ensure the visibility of our community online. Whether on our website or social media, we strive to highlight resources and content that are useful and valuable to the LGBT and ally community in Boston and beyond. To that end, we hope that #WickedProud can be a rallying cry for us all, expressing our collective pride in a characteristically Bostonian way. Throughout the year, Boston Pride will be using the hashtag #WickedProud to proclaim our community’s pride in the virtual world. We invite you to join us in sharing online how #WickedProud you are to be part of the LGBT and ally community.

Since January 2014, Boston Pride has performed an internal reorganization to align better our activities with our mission, to professionalize our approach to community work and event production, and to ensure the long-term sustainability of our efforts. We structured

our event production activities into seven programs (Boston Pride Week, Latin@ Pride, Black Pride, Youth Pride, Human Rights & Education, Pride 365 and the Boston Pride Guide), ensuring more efficient management and improved visibility of our work. We implemented revised internal processes for the various aspects of our work, from partnership engagement to communications, from logistics to volunteer management.

In addition, we updated our leadership structure to be more welcoming and to afford growth to our volunteers within the organization. We created three savings funds for the long-term development of Pride: a rainy-day fund to ensure availability of resources in case of emergency, a reserve fund to allow Boston Pride to hire staff in the coming years, and the Community Fund, aimed at redistributing part of our event proceeds to other LGBT non-profits. We have created a Council of Advisors, a diverse group of community leaders, whose role will be to advise the Board. We have initiated an individual giving campaign, “The Friends of Boston Pride” (please join!), which recognizes members of the community for their generosity to Pride. Based on community requests for a black-tie event, we created the Boston Pride Gala, to kick off Pride Week in style. Finally, we’ve bolstered our outreach to other organizations in order to ensure that Pride is aware of community needs. Oh, and we’ve made the Boston Pride Guide an in-house publication, which involves community collaboration. And, yes, all this was accomplished by an all-volunteer team!

Boston Pride Week 2015 will be held from Friday, June 5 to Sunday, June 14, and will feature over forty official events. Our marquee events include the Boston Pride Gala on June 5, the Pride Parade, Festival, and Youth Dance on June 13, and the Back Bay and JP Block Parties on June 14. We invite you to check out our calendar of events for a full listing. Don’t forget to visit www.bostonpride.org and to download our free app online to stay up to date, as events and happenings are regularly added.

Enjoy the festivities, and Happy Pride 2015!

Sylvain Bruni

President

Linda DeMarco

Vice President

Malcolm Carey

Clerk

Marco Torres

Boston member