Chester Pride Announces Reflect and Connect Event

There's just over a month to go before Chester Pride hosts its biggest fundraising event “Reflect and Connect”.

This event will give people the chance to come together and reflect on the year gone by, whilst connecting with friends new and old. It’s a much smaller ‘pride-lite’ event of 2,000 capacity, unlike the usual 15,000 capacity event that Chester Pride normally hosts in August. Reflect and Connect will take place on the lower car park of Castle Square on Saturday 18^th of September 2021, with tickets priced at £5 per adult and £3 per child (3-16) available from www.chesterpride.co.uk.

Whilst a Chester Pride event, it will be different to the usual Pride celebration and parade the city is used to. The Reflect and Connect event provides the charity a chance to put the focus on promoting its various projects that support the LGBT+ community. It will be showcasing its LGBT+ helpline, called JUST ASK, which has been active though the Covid pandemic, and seeing a high number of LGBT+ people contacting the helpline for help, advice, and ongoing support. There will also be a chance to learn more about Take 5, a mental wellbeing program; THE BOX PROJECT in partnership with Virgin Care, Body Positive and 15 city centre venues to offer free condoms and sanitary/ menstrual products to any user completely for free.

It’s not all charity projects through, the event will be a ‘pride-lite’ event, featuring a fantastic line up of entertainment for everyone to party along with. The event will host local and international artists including home grown talent Sharon Wallace, The Proud Mary’s LGBT Choir, 80’s pop icons Sonia & Kelly Wilde, X factor star Lloyd Daniels, Pop duo the Cheeky Girls along with headliner Atomic Kitten.

Chair of Chester Pride, Warren-Lee Allmark said, “This weekend just gone saw Chester Digital Pride take place over the usual pride event, which was cancelled due to Covid. Although our decision to go online was the best decision we could make, both to keep the public safe, and ensure that we weren’t risking our charities money, we now feel confident that we can bring a much smaller event to the city centre. This event has been planned to be able to be made completely Covid safe, with a limited capacity that should let us go ahead even if we end up back under some Covid restrictions. We’ve also made the decision to charge an entry fee for this smaller, ‘pride-lite’ event as we need to repair the damage to our finances caused by two years without a main Chester Pride event. All the money raised from tickets, beverage, and other sales at the event will go straight back into our charity work, helping us to run our helpline, open our new café and community space due to open shortly after the event, and of course bring Chester Pride back for 2022, which we want to be free for all again. This event is the start of some exciting plans we have for the end of the year, so keep an eye on our social media in the coming weeks to learn more about what’s coming up for us.”

More details about Reflect and Connect, all the charitable projects and Digital Pride can be seen on the charity’s website:

http://www.chesterpride.co.uk