Dear PFLAG Supporter,

It’s almost Pride season, and that means it's time to gather the volunteers to make Pride events happen for your chapter! Volunteers are a key part of attending Pride events across your community and a great opportunity to strengthen and grow your chapter. Building infrastructure makes volunteering easy and fun and can ensure that volunteers come back, while giving them opportunities to join your chapter!

Start with making a volunteer sign up form! Make it easy for folks to express interest in helping, and for you to follow up with them. Remember to ask about tabling or attending Pride events and include additional opportunities to engage in your chapter, like interest in board positions or social media management! If you’re looking to offer single event sign ups for volunteers consider using a platform like signup.com. If you’re looking to collect more robust information about prospective volunteers, consider using a platform like Google forms. 

Host a volunteer orientation. Providing a space for volunteers to build community within your chapter, learn some key messaging, orient themselves to your safety plan, and other key bits of information will help their engagement. Consider developing a short presentation with a handout packet is a great way to help volunteers feel equipped. One major key to keeping volunteers engaged is reducing the stress of these new situations. Consider including information about booth setup, tear down, and storage in addition to how to talk about PFLAG.

Celebrate Volunteers. A crucial piece of building an engaged volunteer (and broader community) base is for folks to feel valued and appreciated. Consider offering incentives like discounted membership (a great way to build your chapter!), PFLAG swag, discounts or merchandise from local businesses. Once Pride is done, make sure to follow up with volunteers and say THANK YOU! Whether it’s a card, email, phone call or text, expressing gratitude will help highlight the importance and value of volunteer engagement. Remember to ask them about another upcoming volunteer opportunity, too!  

Bylaws Updates

Just a reminder that in the next few weeks if you need bylaws updates this year, you’ll be hearing from me in order to get your chapter the support you need to complete your bylaw revisions by September 30, 2024. As PFLAG National and PFLAG chapters, we have mutual responsibilities to each other to ensure PFLAG is a strong, unified organization. These bylaw revisions are an important part of those responsibilities.

We’ll help by providing templates for bylaws and guidance on legal compliance, as well as support with chapter operations if your revision process is held up by tasks unrelated to the actual bylaw revision itself.

Whatever you need, we are here to help with it! So keep an eye out for this communication, which will hit your chapter inboxes in the next few weeks.

A new PFLAG Connects: Communities Meeting!

When our friends at Gender Spectrum reached out to us after announcing they might need to shut their doors and end their support meetings due to lack of resources, we immediately answered the call. And now, we are excited to announce the launch of the newest addition to our PFLAG Connects: Communities (PCC) program: the PFLAG Connects: Gender Spectrum Community. PCC provides safe, virtual, moderated spaces where people with shared experiences can connect each month to gain support, ask questions, and learn from others—and that’s exactly what this new community will do.

To start, we are launching a parent group, the PFLAG Connects: Gender Spectrum Parent Community, which will meet for 90 minutes on the third Monday of each month, at 8pm ET/5pm PT. Our first meeting will be held on Monday, May 20th. Anyone who is a parent or caregiver of a young person who is gender diverse is welcome; the only requirement is to register in advance. 

This is an opportunity to bring new people to the PFLAG family and to connect them directly with our chapters for in-person support. If your chapter has a gender-focused support meeting, please let me know so I can assist you in adding it to the PFLAG National website AND direct attendees to those meetings.

We are proud of this new level of partnership with our friends at Gender Spectrum, and excited to offer not only this new virtual space, but to support chapters by creating this new pipeline to in-person support at your meetings.

Regional Roundup

One way to make it easy for volunteers to jump in and help during Pride month is to put together a “booth book.” A booth book is a guide for volunteers on setting up your PFLAG chapter’s tabling display, and includes materials, pictures, layout instructions, and more! Making institutional knowledge widely accessible to all chapter members, new or old, helps make the work easier. Check out this incredible example from PFLAG Bellevue/Eastside in Washington!

Stay safe,

Ruadhan Ward (They / Them)

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