Blue Ridge Pride Center

Generation Plus Staff and volunteers from our GenPlus Committee worked to create an Eldercare with Pride presentation, which is a 90-minute presentation on LGBTQ+ inclusion, history and rights for those over 55. The presentation was piloted late in 2023 at Pisgah View retirement community, to enthusiastic feedback. We held 7 Connections social events and four Thrive events. The Thrive events included Tai Chi, Nutrition, end of life legal considerations. Connections events ranged from hiking with the Pisgah Forest Rangers to a brewery tour to our annual Stonewall picnic to an ice-cream social. We had roughly 200 face-to-face encounters at our events in 2023.

Welcoming Spaces We created a Welcoming Spaces 101 training, a primer for businesses, nonprofits and groups who would like to be welcoming of the LGBTQIA+ community. We piloted the training at a local University and an early childhood education nonprofit. We worked with Explore Asheville to create a unique logo for Welcoming Spaces, as well as the certification logo. Collaborated with Go Local to sell and present the trainings to local small businesses in 2024. Festival This year we made several improvements to our annual Blue Ridge Pride Festival, which is held in September. These improvements included greening the festival with a compost contractor and water supplier, adding in ASL for Main Stage performers, increasing racial diversity of performers, reducing the number of vendor spots to allow for mobility devices to move between tents, focusing on local vendors to give back to the local economy, among others. We estimate 14,000 attendees joined our 2023 festival.

Pride Portal 2023 was a very successful year for our online Pride Center. We added over 50 new Welcoming Businesses to our Welcoming Directory and added a Definitions and Pronouns resource guide for those wanting a quick introduction to respectful language.