Pride Ashford - our first ever pride event
Ashford's first Pride!
How awesome was Ashford's first ever pride event? Expertly run by volunteers headed by local legend Sam Griffin and one of our favourite local councillors Cllr Heather Hayward. So many people put in so much hard work and it was a real beautiful coming together of Ashford's community and it's organisations supporting & cheerleading the local LGBTQIA+ Community.
Our little organisation was a small piece in the event day and lead up and I wanted to share what we got up too and all the folks that were involved.
Find out more about Pride Ashford & get involved here.
Pride 2024 Report
What we did:
The Craftship
Free Family Craft
3 Saturdays of children & grown up craft with Rainbows & a pride theme. 24 participants.
We made 12 ripstop flags from waste with our sewing group over 5 weeks – 6 volunteers = 39 volunteer hours.
20 additional flags approx. borrowed from CSE.
Rigged all the flags. Some flags were processed and then rigged when they made it to DP. Kindly derigged by Platform bar team.
Made heart lanterns in pride flags decoration with the public in really lovely, engaging & social sessions. We made 7 hearts over 2 x day sessions with 13 people across both days with many coming to both. These were processed and then rigged to the stage. 45 volunteer hours approx.
Created a pride back drop with volunteers 2. 8 volunteer hours.
Made indoor rainbow garland for CW with 2 volunteers. 6 volunteer hours.
Made a fan making crib sheet & circulated online.
Costume making session.
Pride day – Free fan making & paid costume making to generate funds. Craftship was very busy all day 10 – 2 we were open.
Feedback was that it was lovely and great for the community to get together, make friends and people really wanted to help out with pride. Great to have more adults involved in activity, especially new people to utilise the Craftship which in turn drives footfall to the town center. Our team found it quite intensive so we need to spread out our activities over the approaching months more next year.
We did have issues with homophobic abuse at Made in Ashford during the course of June and now ongoing. Security have increased checks.
Pride day creative participants = 58
Total volunteer hours = 112 hours
Pride month total creative participants/volunteers = 105 people
Paid workshop attendees:
Drag Earrings x2
Pride flag friendship bracelets x2
Costume session 1 x10
Costume session 2 x10
Total workshop attendees = 24
MIA
Hand painted & designed pride window with fans! Championed our queer makers & pride themed products. Gave out lots of flyers and word of mouth info about pride Ashford!
PM Market
17 total Makers
Our market manager said it was the busiest down park mall they had seen for a few years on a COB day!
Promotional work around the event and activities
Flyers & posters
Blog post
18 social media posts (plus stories)
It was really a wonderful event and our team were pleased to let their hair down at the after party after a month working very hard! We were very proud of Ashford coming out for a fantastic Pride!
Pride Ashford donated us some funds to help with the costs of putting on the month of activities. Thank you so much Pride Ashford!
Pics by Andy Jones
