The charity that runs Nottingham Pride has announced plans to close the pride, unless a generous benefactor helps raise the cash needed to continue.
The annual pride event which was created in 2003 has announced that it is to close its doors after failing to raise enough money to keep it going.
The BBC report that the acting chairman Ben Holmes said that ‘the charity has been in financial trouble for the last three years but tried scaling down the event to save money.’
‘I have invested many years of my life into making sure the event happened and unfortunately it has come to a point where we have to look at where it is going in the future,’ said Mr Holmes.
‘We are losing sponsors and we lost an awful lot of money from companies that are no longer going. We are not generating enough funds.
‘We hope something can happen. The charity could be saved if money comes in but unfortunately that doesn’t look likely.’
The Pride event which was in its 10th year costs £30,000 to host and they asked each visitor to donate just £1, however this year only one third of the estimated 14,000 attendees made a contribution.
On a statement on their website Nottingham Pride said,
‘We have now had time to count the donations received from the community who attended Nottinghamshire Pride and can announce that we raised a total of £4279.86 on the day.
‘We would like to say thank to those who donated, but regret to inform that this is somewhat short of the £12,000 we needed to raise on the day.
‘This means that unless an anonymous benefactor would like to make up the difference, we will have no choice but to explore options for charging at next year’s event. This is not a move we as a committee want to make, but following feedback from the community last year, we made 2013 donation entry and haven’t raised enough – this has somewhat forced our hand.’
The charity has amassed £17,000 worth of debt.
