UK Pride faces a “critical” funding crisis amid warnings that Donald Trump’s assault on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the US is having a direct impact on firms in Britain.
The UK Pride Organisers Network said 75 per cent of Pride events across the UK have seen a decline in corporate sponsorships this year, with a quarter experiencing funding drops of more than 50 per cent.
Meanwhile, GoFundMe has reported a “remarkable” 82 per cent increase in organisers resorting to crowdfunding events to bridge the financial gap.
Pride organisers have told The Independent that big corporations who have long sponsored them are “pulling back their funding in all aspects”, especially those with head offices in the US, after Trump issued a series of executive orders targeting diversity programmes in the public and private sectors, with many corporations such as Amazon and Google scaling back their DEI efforts since February.
While Pride has grown as a movement across the UK for a decade, Dee Llewellyn, chair of UK Pride Organisers Network and director of partnerships and growth for London Pride, said corporate funding has “fallen off a cliff”, causing a number of events across the country close their doors, including big events such as Liverpool.
The situation has led one expert to warn that “the golden era of corporate sponsorship might be over” for LGBT+ organisers.
Mrs Llewellyn fears the LGBT+ community could experience “five years of difficulty and struggles” as Trump fully implements the DEI cuts, adding “it is the start of that process now”.
“I think we will see more global brands declining, not because they don’t want to participate, but because they don’t have the DEI budget to do so,” she added. “It’s not the people on the ground in the UK either, I’ve had brands that have withdrawn this year that were absolutely devastated to have to do it.
“But they’ve had their budgets cut from America and there was absolutely nothing they could do to argue or fight that in the UK.”
Pride events across the country receive a bulk of funding from big businesses, varying on a scale of a minimum of 50 per cent funding to events like London, where approximately 95 per cent of the funding comes from corporate partnerships.
Gary Richardson, an organiser from Worthing Pride whose regional celebrations were almost cancelled this year, said: “It very much seems if they’ve got offices overseas, specifically in America, the DEI conversations that are happening there seem to be drip feeding into the economy over here.”
John Hyland, former co-chair of Liverpool Pride and the Community Partnerships and Individual Giving Lead for LGBT+ charity Sahir, close supporters of Pride celebrations in the city, echoed Mr Richardson’s point: “When America sneezes, we all catch a cold.”
“Businesses seem to be a bit more reluctant to support LGBT organisations, which is having a massive impact on the likes of Pride,” he added.
Pride in Liverpool had to cancel its plans this year due to “significant financial and organisational challenges, which have impacted timescales and resulted in it reverting to an almost entirely volunteer-led operation”.
Organisers severed ties with key sponsor Barclays in May after the bank’s boss said it would prohibit Trans women from using female toilets in its buildings following the Supreme Court Ruling which ruled that the terms “woman” and “sex” in the 2010 Equality Act “refer to a biological woman and biological sex”.
“I think definitely in light of what’s happened with the Supreme Court ruling, we’ve had a number of number of transgender community-led protests happen in Liverpool,” said Mr Hyland. “If there’s a year where we need Pride to happen, it’s this year and our community has been very vocal about that.”
As well as a decrease in corporate sponsorships, organisers have cited that local communities have struggled to fill the financial hole in Pride events planning due to the cost of living.
Mr Hyland said that calls for support from local businesses in Liverpool fell through because “they haven’t got that kind of money”.
On an average year, it costs around £140,000 to produce Worthing Pride over a weekend. Around 60 per cent of the budget comes from sponsorship, while the rest comes from ticket sales. This year, the organisers are aiming for 70 per cent from ticket sales and 30 per cent from sponsors.
Instead of receiving support from five or six big sponsors, they’ve managed to accrue 20 small sponsorships instead, with a number of companies offering pro bono support.
Dr Francesca Ammaturo, senior lecturer in in Sociology and International Relations at London Metropolitan University, author of forthcoming book The Politics of Pride Events: Global and Local Challenges, said that while big businesses have taken on Pride as an issue of corporate responsibility, organisers have relied on corporate sponsorship because public funding has not always been accessible to the LGBT+ community.
“Pride events have become really dependent on them,” she said. “Now when you insert the rollback that Trump is enacting on DEI policies, that is sending shockwaves not just across the US, but also across the globe because of globalisation.
She added: “The repercussions for these companies to sponsor pride events even beyond the US could be creating some backlash at home.
“It’s quite difficult for LGBT organisers today to accept that the golden era of corporate sponsorship might be over, at least for now until we realise what the next political shift that we will encounter is.”
Dr Ammaturo added that big business involvement in Pride had always been “a very superficial commitment” more akin to “a marriage of convenience which was conducive to a certain veneer of rainbow-washing”.
Mrs Llewellyn said that despite the radical funding cuts, Pride will persist in the UK, adding: “It’s essential now more than ever, really more than it has been over the past 10 years for us to be able to stand together as a community to have that safe space for us to join together.
“Pride is a protest. That is what it was born and rooted in,” she added. “We’ve been through lots of hardships as a community, but when we stand together and we unite our voices, that is when we’re strongest.”
