Who We Are & What We Do
NG Pride literally prides itself on the fact that we are transparent, open, inclusive, and willing to listen to our community. This is exactly what we have been doing for the past year. We have been working diligently at creating our Strategic Plan for the next few years to come. We have also been creating a firm foundation of policies and best practices required and needed to run a successful non-profit. This takes time. We have one paid position and the rest of our support and work comes from a very dedicated, hardworking volunteer board of directors, without whom NG Pride, as it stands right now, would not exist. Our funding to complete this important work has come from Women and Gender Equality Canada and we are so happy to report that we have met every single one of their deliverables and we will be sharing our plan and outcomes in full with you all in April! But in true Pride fashion we are little too excited, so we thought we would give you a little sneak peek… We have used surveys, focus groups, conversations with other pride organizations and researched best practices to ensure we are creating exactly what our 2SLGBTQI+ community needs. It has been a long year of listening and we are so pleased with the incredible support from North Grenville!
One of our key activities even before we started thinking big picture strategic planning was to take the time to understand the overall capacity of NG Pride within our local community. Being a volunteer organization meant that capacity would be limited but with structure and a solid foundation, it became clear that this organization will accomplish incredible things with. Structure would come in the form of strong by laws, the development of Board of Director job descriptions, board recruitment, increase and improve donor relations, create internal practices for strong financial management, the creation of diverse and stable funding and the development of a mission and vision statement that would guide our every move. Phew…and that is just the organizational structure! 😊
Another area we have taken great care in developing is our volunteer and board recruitment process. Increasing our diversity and 2SLGBTQI+ representation has always been very important to us. Over the last year we have engaged with our 2SLGBTQI+ community to encourage folks to take part in our leadership roles to help create a better representation of the community we are serving. This has been and always will be very important to the work we do, and we are so excited to be announcing new board members in the next few weeks!
We also wanted to share with you that we have hit the ground running when it comes to planning our first Pride Parade since our inaugural parade in 2019. We promise a beautiful day of acceptance, celebration, advocacy and perhaps a few other little surprises! Follow us on our social media to learn more.
One last thing, thank you to all who have supported us thus far and thank you to those who have asked the difficult questions of us, we appreciate you all. We understand that what we are trying to accomplish needs the full backing of our community and no one person can do it alone. We have relied on so many, and it so many have stepped up. Thank you, North Grenville!
There is room for everyone under our rainbow!
Yours in Pride,
North Grenville Pride Board of Directors