This month, Cambridge City Council is flying the Progress Pride flag to mark Pride month – a month dedicated to celebrating the LGBTQ+ community.
Pride is a commemoration of the progress that has been made for the rights of the LGBTQ+ community but also an opportunity to promote the need for further education and awareness of issues that affect people within the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and other communities.
Across the world celebrations will be taking place. On Saturday 15 June, Cambridge Pride will return to Jesus Green for a festival that creates a safe space for people from the LGBTQ+ community to feel a stronger sense of belonging and visibility. The Deputy Mayor of Cambridge will be opening the event.
Sponsored by Anglia Ruskin University, the festival is free to attend and open to everyone.
The council is proud to support the event by providing advice and festival space (Jesus Green) free of charge to help ensure that the event can happen. The council also awarded £5,000 this year to The Pink Festival Group to be put towards organising Cambridge Pride.
The council aims to ensure that Cambridge is a welcoming and inclusive city where everyone can feel safe. In October 2020, the council passed the Trans rights are human rights motion to address hate crimes and discrimination aimed at the LGBTQ+ community. The motion makes wider commitments to LGBTQ+ people as well as trans people. One part of this motion and the council’s flags flying protocol commits us to raise the Progress Pride flag for LGBTQ+ History Month and Pride month, and the trans flag on International Trans Day of Visibility and International Trans Day of Remembrance.
Funding has also been provided to The Kite Trust again this year - funding worth £13,400 was awarded so that they can carry out their work to support young LGBTQ+ people in Cambridge and the coordination of LGBTQ+ History Month activities for February 2025.
Historically, the council has been a supporter of the Encompass Network, until it ceased operations last year. The council was an active supporter and early adopter of the Safer Spaces campaign aimed at local organisations to help ensure that their workplaces and services provided to the public are safe, welcoming, and inclusive for LGBTQ+ people. The council was a committed signatory of the campaign for a number of years. In 2020, the council provided funding for the network to conduct an LGBTQ+ needs assessment in our area. This asked local LGBTQ+ people about their health and wellbeing, safety, experiences of being out, domestic violence and hate crimes, issues within the community, and experiences accessing council and LGBTQ+ services. The findings of the needs assessment were used to help shape the council’s Single Equality Scheme (2024 to 2027) that contains objectives for Cambridge City Council around meeting its Public Sector Equality Duty.
The council is keen to talk to anyone who is part of a local group supporting LGBTQ+ people or organising events for the community to identify opportunities where the council may be able to provide support.
The council’s support for the LGBTQ+ community is part of its wider commitment to strengthening equality and inclusion and celebrating diversity in Cambridge. You can find out more about our ongoing equality and diversity work, including:
- Our equality and diversity policy
- Our Equality Value Statement, which sets out the responsibility of our staff
- Our Single Equality Scheme (2021 to 2024), which is our current plan and includes objectives and actions around our Public Sector Equality Duty
- And the Equality Pledge – which encourages partners and individuals to show their commitment to challenging discrimination and promoting equality of opportunity by signing the Pledge – which the council is a co-founder and signatory of.
