 I'm Tom Handel and we're here with a CTN member highlight. And today we're focusing on a launch party for Pride Portland. And I'm here with Jill Barkley and Crystal Connor, both co-chairs of Pride Portland. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for having us. Thanks for having us. Before we get into the launch party, what is Pride Portland all about? Well, Pride Portland is a new organization. We started last year in Portland and we work with Maine's and primarily Portland's lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and allied communities to put on an annual celebration celebrating our diversity. Great, great. So when does this all happen? We actually operate all year long because we found that the community is really yearning for a sense of community and connection. But the actual Pride celebration is 10 days in June. Starting June 12th and wrapping up with our finale party on June 21st. The big day is June 20th. It's Saturday, June 20th. And that's our parade and festival that everyone's grown to know and love. And I know that you've had a number of events already this year to raise money and that sort of thing. What's the launch party all about? The launch party is really exciting. So last year that was our first big event after we started the organization and kicked off and we had no idea what would happen and we had this great party at Port City Music Hall and sold out, which was amazing and inspiring. So this year we decided we wanted to do it all again. So we will be at Port City Music Hall on Friday, May 15th for our launch party where we will reveal a number of things including our 10 days of events and our parade marshals. So that's a really big thing for everybody to do is a lot of things under wrap and build-in. And as we keep everything top secret, we just wanna again build excitement around the fact and there's a ton of stuff happening throughout the month of June by a lot of our partner organizations. But for us it's about kind of capturing the spirit of the community in those 10 days. And so the launch party is a really cool way for us to get people excited about that. We tease a little bit with some of the performers that people will see throughout Pride Week. It's just a really nice way to kind of bring everyone together. Now to do something like this, I imagine it takes a lot of volunteers and a lot of sponsorships. Can you talk about that? Do you have a need for sponsorships, a need for volunteers? We do. We're really lucky because a lot of our community comes out to our events leading up to May and June and by their donations we're able to put on more events. However, we do need corporate sponsors and we do need more individual sponsors as well. And if people wanted to volunteer or sponsor, how would they go about doing that? We're 100% volunteer run. Our steering committee, our leadership teams, we have five different work teams and all of those are open to everyone. We have a monthly community meeting that we hold on the first Thursday of the month at USM at 7 p.m. And that's a really good way for volunteers to come. People can like us on Facebook at Pride Portland. We do continuous updates and event invites and so that's a really good way. Also our website is www.prideportland.org and there's an opportunity there for people to volunteer and also for sponsorship, whether it be small but local businesses, larger corporations and also individual sponsors. Anyone that wants to contribute to what we're doing, we don't say no. So it's really about, again, it's really being a community-owned project. So you keep on emphasizing community so I suppose that even though it's LGBT focused, absolutely anybody is welcome to any of these events. Absolutely. So the great thing about living here in Maine and doing this work is that Maine has made so much progress, especially in the last 10 years by passing laws that protect people from discrimination, passing marriage equality at the ballot. And so we have an amazing allied community that has always supported Maine's lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. And so this celebration is really for them as well to come and participate and be a part of our community. Now the idea of Pride Portland, it's a city-wide event and other cities have their own, it doesn't all happen on the same weekend for all these cities, does it? It doesn't. Bangor Pride, so in Maine, there's Pride Portland and Bangor Pride. And that happens the week after ours on June 25th through the 28th, I believe. And so there's a big celebration there. I just learned that Portsmouth is adding a pride this year so that's exciting for them. Boston Pride happened the week before us so kind of everyone's settled into their schedules and they happen on the same weekends every year so no one steps on anyone's toes. Now the name of this sort of implies what the purpose is but is it deeper than just developing a sense of pride in the LGBT community? Absolutely, I think so. It's about building community and really connecting us to each other. So even as we continue to make advancements, there's always more work that needs to be done so that everyone in our community experiences full-lived equality. So we can pass as many laws as we want to but until everyone in our community feels safe, feels comfortable, can be who they are then our work is not done. So Pride is also about that. It's not a political organization in any means but a lot of what we do is political because it's about our personal lives. That's great. So for this launch event, just to wrap up and give everybody some information, how much is it? Where is it? What time? Give all the details. Yeah, you can help me with this. Next Friday, May 15th, doors open at eight o'clock. The show starts at nine. We have a lot of local performers. It's at Port City Music Hall and it's only five dollars. Yeah and almost all of our performers are donating their time that night so really all of those proceeds go back to support the 10 days of Pride in June. And it's 18 plus. So that's something that's also important to us that we can try to involve as much of the community as possible. So a lot of our events are diverse in terms of who we're trying to outreach to and who we're trying to get to come to our events. So this event is 18 plus. Okay, great. And if people wanted to know more, they would go to the website that you mentioned. The website, yeah and just some of the, it's being MC'd by one of our favorite local drag performers, Cherry Lemonade. And the DJ this year is a DJ Red Tide who's very well known in Portland's queer community. So it's really exciting. Some other performers, we have a local drag troupe named 5G that's performing Lady's Xanon Aquarius Funk, some Burlesque groups. Atomic Trash and Strip Wrecked Burlesque. Whoa. There's a newer venue in town called Studio 55 and they have started an all male review show. And so the men of Studio 55 are joining us for the night, which will be, again, another really nice addition to this year's show. And there's gonna be a fashion show put on by an organization called Jack Tar, which focuses on fashion for all genders and all bodies. So we're really excited about that fashion show. It's gonna be really beautiful. Sounds like an action pack night. Dancing, music, fun. Again, Jill mentioned earlier, but we'll present to you what this year's parade marshals are. And then we'll reveal the 10 days of Pride, our full schedule, which I think this year is gonna be, last year we had 22. In our first year when we decided let's try something, we ended up with 22 events over 10 days. And I think we have now surpassed 22 events. So we're probably looking at close to 30 events this year. Yeah. Okay, yeah. So rest up for June. We're tired already. All right. Well, thank you very much for joining us and good luck with it. We'll be sure that a lot of people will come. Thanks for having us.