Margate Pride 2025

Aim: We’re crowdfunding to keep Margate Pride Festival & Pride Day free, inclusive, and accessible to the thousands of people who participate.

Help Keep Margate Pride Free & Community-Led

Margate Pride has always been more than just a parade. It’s a protest. A celebration. A commitment to year-round organising, creative expression, and community care that centres LGBTQIA+ lives in Margate, Thanet and beyond. 

Pride Day, and much of the festival and year-round programming designed to uplift, educate and connect and includes youth programmes; TeaTime Socials for swishy seniors; talks; socials; advocacy, screening and more. It is mostly free or ‘pay what you can’ and we want to keep it that way. We do this while refusing to seek or accept corporate sponsorship, (see how we’re funded here), to ensure Pride stays focused on what matters: people, not profit

🌈 Why Pride Matters - for Everyone

Each August, our headline event - Pride Day - brings thousands of people together to Margate in joyful protest and radical celebration. It’s a moment of visibility, solidarity and empowerment for the LGBTQIA+ community, as well as our many intersections - and a moment for the whole town to show up and say: Margate is a welcoming, inclusive place to be.

Margate Pride doesn’t just serve LGBTQIA+ people - it benefits the town as a whole. Pride fosters belonging. It sparks creativity. It drives local business. It strengthens social bonds and challenges hate. And it helps make Margate a safer, prouder, more connected place for everyone who calls it home - or visits.

But none of it can happen without your help.

We’re crowdfunding £20,000 to keep our Pride Festival and Pride Day free, inclusive, and accessible to all to the thousands of people who participate.

Your donation will go directly toward:

• Delivering exhibitions, performances and creative workshops
• Supporting Youth Pride and community-led programming
• Ensuring safeguarding, wellbeing and accessibility for all attendees
• Covering essential infrastructure like road closures, toilets, and security
• Paying artists, organisers and technical staff fairly

Whether you live in Margate or love to visit, your support helps us continue to bring joy, creativity and care to the town—365 days a year.

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Did you know Pride doesn’t stop in August?
Your donation also supports our ongoing work to:

✅ Platform underrepresented voices through exhibitions, talks, and performance
✅ Partner with the BeYou Project to support LGBTQIA+ youth
✅ Host Teatime Socials for LGBTQIA+ elders and friends
✅ Deliver training to increase inclusion and awareness
✅ Support queer asylum seekers and refugees in partnership with KRAN
✅ Collaborate with orgs like East Kent Mencap to broaden access
✅ Offer artist residencies and open call opportunities
✅ Celebrate Thanet’s LGBTQIA+ history through creative research
✅ Advocate for queer rights and challenge rising hate

🏳️‍🌈 Why Now?

Funding has become increasingly competitive. Despite incredible in-kind support from venues like Dreamland and Turner, it still costs tens of thousands to safely, fairly and accessibly run Margate Pride. 

Our team works hard all year applying for grants, selling merch, and seeking donations. And it's working! We have secured a significant amount from The National Lottery Community Fund, as well as other grants including those from the Arts Council and Colyer Ferguson. These will help us cover some core costs, as well as deliver an open call commission for a disabled queer artist, a performance residency, and a portraits show featuring four LGBTQIA+ artists. But the costs come in far beyond what the grants cover. From paying artists, year-round staff and technicians, to printing signs, hiring toilets, staging performances, delivering Youth Pride, platforming queer organisations at the rally, and delivering wellbeing support—it all adds up. With pots running dry and the work growing in urgency, we need to turn to our community

If you love what we do, please consider donating. No amount is too small.

📢 This Crowdfunder Is Bigger Than One Day

Since 2016, Margate Pride has been pushing back against hate and building a more inclusive, creative, and compassionate town. From challenging far-right rhetoric, to uplifting trans, intersex and non-binary people, to providing space for joy and protest - we’re far from done.

This crowdfunder isn’t just about August.
It’s about the future of an inclusive Margate.
It’s about keeping Pride free, community-led and defiant

💖 Here's How You Can Help:

• Donate: Every contribution—big or small—makes a huge difference
• Share: Spread the word across your networks
• Join us: See what we’re building together at www.margatepride.org.uk

THANK YOU

Funding method

Keep what you raise – this project will receive all pledges made by 3rd July 2025 at 5:19pm