As we near the one-year mark since the official launch of the Canadian Pride Historical Society (CPHS), we’ve made a lot of progress on the documentation and education project. The theme that comes to mind in the last 10 months would be lessons learned. When we initiated the project in September 2020, we had big goals to complete 25 Pride profiles by June 28, 2021, along with education resources. As we embarked on the journey, we encountered a few bumps along the way including the difficulty in finding historical information online, getting in contact with Pride Organizations, and the lack of volunteer researchers. These challenges along with some others lead us to the decision to defer the launch until 2022 and rethink our research and education plan.
Our new plan is to go small and focus on launching a single community in 2022 as a proof of concept. By focusing on one community, it will allow us to build a proper process for historical documentation and develop a final profile that we can then replicate for other communities. This process will be more efficient and allow for better learning and discovery. After the launch of our first community our hope is that more communities can follow at a faster pace.