LGBTQ leaders from Around the world in City to share ideas

Interpride World Conference chance for delegates to network, share ideas

Pride festival organizers from around the world will converge in Saskatoon for the 2018 Interpride AGM and World Conference.

Organizers say it’s a chance for LGBTQ leaders to share ideas, brainstorm and re-energize.

The event’s co-chair of logistics, Brice Field, said the conference, which was three years in the making, will bring about 280 delegates to the city. Interpride serves as the international association for pride organizations across the globe, and the conference is a critical time for many, he said.

“Most pride festival organizers are volunteers and it can be exhausting work. These conferences work as inspiration and rejuvenate their spirit to go back to their home city and to keep on doing the advocacy work they ’re currently doing.”

The conference is a chance for organizers to also learn from one another, since organizers have likely had some of the same experiences, Field said. Getting together enables them to share different solutions on subjects ranging from online marketing to funding a pride festival. It’s also a time to address some of the larger issues facing Pride festivals; one of the main focuses of this year’s conference is inclusivity within the LGBTQ community.

“We have a lot of workshops on how to include marginalized people within the LGBT community and how to better include them in their pride festival … to make sure that pride is for everybody and to make sure that people are not left out of the celebration,” Field said.

The conference kicked off on Thursday with a pipe ceremony.

Field said the opening welcome session later in the day focused on welcoming members of the twospirt community and on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action.

The conference will include a cultural room where people can speak with elders.

Julian Sanjivan, a delegate from New York City, said the events are a chance to keep human-rights concerns within the LGBTQ community front and centre. Gay relationships are still a crime in more than 70 countries, Sanjivan noted.

“A platform like this is really, really great where we can come together — and it’s not just talking about how do you organize, how do you deal with sponsorship, how do we deal with all of the different things in planning — but it’s also talking about the next stage of human rights.”

He said for LGBTQ people in the U.S., there’s a lot of uncertainty under the presidency of Donald Trump, pointing to a recent decision to deny permanent residencies for the same-sex partners of diplomats to the U.S.

Some of the major inroads made during the Barack Obama presidency are “quickly being taken away,” he said.

Members of Interpride are “like a family” and connections and working relationships formed at the conference usually continue after the event has concluded, he added.

“It all starts here. We all come together, we build that network and then we take that with us.”