Our Rainbow Ribbon Pins Were A Big Hit At The 2016 RI Pride Fest!  

  What an emotional roller coaster this past week has been--from waking up in horror to the news of the Orlando massacre, to attending two impressive moving vigils for our sons and daughters and non-binary children so brutally murdered in Orlando, to finally showing our character, strength, determination, and PRIDE as parents, allies and members or the LGBTQ community that we will not be frightened, ignored nor denied our place in this world as evidenced by the huge turnouts at both Pride Fest and the Illuminated Night Parade on June 18th!

Thank you RI Pride for putting on a fabulous 40th Anniversary Pride Fest! I also want to thank all of the volunteers from PFLAG who worked so very diligently in helping PFLAG Greater Providence get ready for Pride this year, as well as those who volunteered their time staffing our booth and pinning over 3,000 rainbow ribbons on Pride Fest attendees in the hot sun! (Yes, I said over 3,000!) We actually ran out of ribbons this year.
​
I especially want to give a HUGE shout out of thanks to Jill Duff and Jimmy Rotondo and their spouses Bob Duff and Roseanne Rotondo for their tireless efforts in organizing our Pride event. Jim's truck looked awesome in the parade! Also Denise Messier-Reynolds for organizing our ribbon pin making party and Joe and Dianne Ordog for making all our buttons and providing our tent this year--thank you!  And special thanks to my husband Ron for all his help as I prepped and loaded and unloaded supplies for the event and for covering our booth for the entire day. I know there were many, many more of you who helped this year, either before the event, during and after. I don't have a list of all your names, so as not to risk leaving someone out, I just want all of you to know that on behalf of our PFLAG Greater Providence chapter, thank you from the bottom of my heart, especially to all those dads who wore themselves the day before Father's Day! You certainly deserved a very restful Father's Day!

We had a lot of traffic at our booth and were able to provide attendees with lots of helpful information of all kinds, which is why we are there. Without all of our volunteers, we could not do what we do!  Again THANK YOU! 

Please enjoy the slideshow of photos taken at the 2016 RI Pride Fest.