Pride WA are confident that this year’s revamped Pride Festival will satisfy the concerns raised by the Perth City Council regarding the ongoing viability of the festival.
Following several years of falling numbers, this years festival is set to be remarkably different. Featuring a daytime parade at the start of the festival, a music festival and a three week long calendar of events.
Co-president Daniel Smith welcomed the renewed funding saying, “The City of Perth has provided sponsorship support to Pride WA for almost 15 years, and we appreciate the City’s ongoing commitment.”
One of the major changes to the festival from previous years in the change of the annual parades timing from an evening event to an afternoon kick off.
“Daytime Pride parades are held around the world in cities like San Francisco, New York, Berlin, Johannesburg and Melbourne,” highlighted Mr Smith, “we are very confident that the staging of our parade during the day will bring even more people into Northbridge to see it.”
Mr Smith noted that the team at Pride WA had been looking at how other successful festivals were operating including the successful Fringeworld event that has rapidly grown over the last three years.
“This year, Pride will use professional events managers to run all of our events for the first time, and we will invest a lot of money in improving content in both the parade and our celebration events.”
The move to outsourcing the organisation of the festival is part of the organisation’s strategic plan that highlights that the community members who volunteer to be on the organisation’s committee are often exhausted by the end of the festival, which leads to a high turnover of committee members.
Mr Smith also shared that the organisation is also introducing several measures to improve the quality of the floats in the parade.
“For example, we hope to soon announce details of a professional float-‐building program, which will see corporate sponsorship used to fund artists to work with community groups to build high quality, artistic and entertaining parade entries,” explained Mr Smith.
At the conclusion of the festival Pride WA plans to conduct extensive consultation with Northbridge business owners to see how the festival helped their businesses as well a stakeholder engagement with the LGBTI community. The results of this process will be used in future funding applications to clearly demonstrate the value of the festival.
The Pride Parade is on Saturday November 2, followed by a three week long festival.
OIP Staff
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