The rainbow flag will be raised today (June 7) by Alberta's Minister of Culture and Tourism Ricardo Miranda in recognition of Pride Month in Canada and an Airdrie group is celebrating the occasion. 

Airdrie Pride is taking the month to make sure that everyone in the city knows of the services and opportunities that are available, according to their President Kiersten Mohr.  The group is planning to approach city council to also have the Pride flag flown in Airdrie later this month.  

Mohr says, in her mind, the month to recognize the pride movement is an important one.  "It's important to make sure that everyone in this community, in Airdrie specifically, knows that they have a place in our community.  Airdrie Pride has been getting a lot of programming going in the last year and we're certainly going to be using it as an opportunity just to make sure everybody knows what;'s available in Airdrie."

Mohr says Airdrie Pride has three regular programs that run in the city year round and aren't limited to Pride Month.  

"We have a group called Prysm which is our community GSA (Gay-Straight Alliance) and that's open to youth from any school in Airdrie and surrounding area.  We've been running that successfully since December of last year.  The other program we've got going is called Parenting With Pride.  That's for parents of LGBTQ2+ youth that are working with their kids in this community and just want to do the best to support them.  Then we also run a community coffee on a monthly basis just as kind of an opening for anybody of any age in the community to come out and meet others and try to connect as many people as possible within Airdrie."

For Prysm, the GSA group, Mohr says they're regularly getting 10 to 15 youth out to events in Airdrie.  She counts it as successful because it's bringing together youth from various school GSAs in Airdrie which was the group's objective.  

According to Mohr, "What we found was there were GSAs set up in a lot of the schools but in a community the size of Airdrie they were pretty isolated and we wanted to create a space that brought all of them together to get the numbers higher so the support was greater.  Airdrie Pride's drive with Prysm is to support these youth and put in place services and education and anything they're asking us to help them with.  It's really kind of getting some feet underneath it and we really hope it will continue to grow throughout the year."

Mohr agrees that the LGBTQ2+ community has made great strides forward in Alberta and in Airdrie in recent years, however, she also thinks they shouldn't become complacent.  

"I think we're definitely progressing but there's still a lot of cases of individuals that find themselves in tough spots in this province.  While it's, on the whole, a pretty safe place and access to services and all that kind of stuff is moving in the right direction, we certainly don't want to be complacent on the fact that discrimination is still happening in Alberta.  Bill 24 (the act to support Gay-Straight Alliances in Alberta) is a fantastic example of exactly that where these youth, in particular, are feeling threatened and compromised.  What Airdrie Pride's trying to do is make sure that we're continually advocating and just continually ensuring that youth and adults and everyone knows and feels comfortable that Airdrie's a safe place for them and there's lots of us that are here to support them."  

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