NB365: Le Rendez-Vous De La Fierté Acadie Love In Caraquet
This is part of a year-long ‘Love for Local’ series called NB365: portraits of New Brunswick entrepreneurs, businesses and organizations. Huddle is a media partner with Love for Local. Today, we hear from Maryse Chapdelaine, President of Le Rendez-vous de la Fierté Acadie Love in Caraquet.
Le Rendez-vous de la Fierté Acadie Love is the only large-scale Pride Celebration in rural French-speaking regions in the Atlantic region, and has been for five years now.
The organization was created in order to affirm the presence of the 2SLGBTQ+ communities in the region in an annual, cultural, educational and festive setting. This Celebration has allowed us to recognize gender diversity and to give a place and a voice to communities that are still struggling for full recognition.
The success of the Summer Festival allowed us to establish our place and to think of interventions throughout the year with the help of our members and our team. We have developed inclusive summer activities that allow for the discussion of issues affecting the 2SLGBTQ+ communities, cultural events of good scope and mobilized all political and community forces around the inclusion of the 2SLGBTQ+ communities in a rural, minority and francophone context.
Since last fall, thanks to a federal contribution, we now have full-time staff and space located at the Centre Culturel de Caraquet. This allows us to coordinate our different projects in a common location. Our goal is to bring together the forces involved in all areas of society around the issue of the inclusion of minorities, particularly the 2SLGBTQ+ communities.
While we were preparing the fourth summer edition (2020) of Acadie Love in person, public health measures forced us to rethink our programming. We had to choose between doing nothing or using means we had to adapt to. We decided to present events to a limited audience, making sure to present them virtually, live and on camera, and to keep them on our social media.
These new ways of doing things allowed us to increase the number of people who attended our conferences and cultural activities. But even better to break the geographical barriers. It is now a given that all of our in-person activities will also be captured for broadcast on our social networks. Our ability to reach a large audience and particularly the 2SLGBTQ+ communities is thus multiplied by ten.
This year, we are once again organizing a three-day summer festival that will include public conferences and debates, sports and recreational activities for the whole family, performances with artists, gastronomic events, and all of this while taking into account the rules, but also offering them online in order to pursue our objectives of reaching the largest number of people possible.
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