Big Numbers

I'm pretty used to seeing big numbers, every time I get in my car or van I see pretty big numbers on the odometer, the car has done over 110,000 miles and the van over 220,000.   But the numbers I have in mind are smaller than those, the other day we had a post Pride meeting to assess how we did, and where we go from here.

The official estimates are that we had over 600 people on the parade and at least 3,000 for the event in the Park.   I suspect that both of these estimates are on the low side, unfortunately some figures that are not on the low side are the costs of running events like these.   We are determined to keep Croydon Pride Fest a free event, celebrating the progress of the LGBT+ community while maintaining an element of protest to keep fighting for equality, for all the community.  

We are thankful for the support from the Council and our sponsors, but for next year we will need to get in an awful lot more money. To maintain the quality of the event while growing the numbers of people who can attend we have had to set a budget very nearly twice the one we had this year.   We will need to get more sponsorship, we will need more commercial stalls at the event, and we will have to get individual donors.   We will have to have fund raising events, in short we will need a team of fundraisers and volunteers, the work for next year has already started!

I can't help but notice one other rather big number, this blog has now passed the 500,000 mark of page views, so if you have been, thank you for reading.