Pride in the 815 aims to celebrate DeKalb’s LGBTQ youth

DeKALB – Pride in the 815, a new event aimed at celebrating LGBTQ youth in the community, will take over Hopkins Park in DeKalb this weekend.

It all starts at noon Saturday at Hopkins Park, 1403 Sycamore Road, DeKalb. The event is held in June, which is Pride month.

Organizers behind the inaugural Pride in the 815 event invite the community to come together for a free day filled with family-oriented fun.

Shauna Stevens, one of the organizers behind Pride in the 815 and a member of the DeKalb Leadership Academy, said she and her team felt there was an opportunity to do more to celebrate Pride Month in DeKalb County.

DeKalb is already home to the annual DeKalb County Pride Fest.

“It’s just another [event],” Stevens said. “It’s just a kick off is all we’re calling it.”

Pride in the 815 will feature food trucks, lip-synching, guest speakers, community resource tables, live music and a DJ.

Stevens, acknowledging that both Pride events in town are family-friendly, said organizers behind the new Pride in the 815 are cognizant of a need to differentiate between the two.

“Both of them, people are welcome to,” Stevens said. “Pride [Fest], they’re going to focus on vendors and resources in the area. So they have their own thing that they’re going to be doing. What we wanted to do was something that kids can come lip-synching. That’s going to be our big thing. We have the whole music shell and we have a DJ. Then, we have a drag MC. She’s going to be emceeing, calling the people up, talking to people. We have three motivational speakers.”

Stevens said she believes community youth are driving the need for another Pride event in town.

“When Pride [Fest] started out a couple years ago, there was only a couple hundred that came to that one and now they’re up into the thousands,” Stevens said. “The thing is, if there’s not people like us trying to promote stuff like this, there’s not going to be people feeling like they can come out into … [the] community. We’re only going to be there if there’s a necessity to be there. So if people feel that this is something that they felt so comfortable at and would love to see something like this more in the future because it actually involves the community, I don’t see why we wouldn’t do it again.”

Organizers behind Pride in the 815 are waiting until after the inaugural year to determine if the event should be held on an annual basis moving forward.

Stevens said she and her team will make that determination after reviewing feedback from everyone involved in putting on this year’s event.