Fundraising for this year’s Denver Pride Parade has fallen by two-thirds compared to last year — part of a national trend in response to fears created by the new presidential administration.
Pride officials, in the meantime, are being tight-lipped about which, if any, of its former funders are no longer supporting the events.
“Denver Pride has experienced a decrease in funding when compared to previous years for our festival parade, festival and 5K race. Some organizations that have participated in years past have only been able to return at lower levels of sponsorship and others have even been unable to return entirely, due to rollbacks in DEI budgets caused by national legislation,” said Natalie Zanoni, interim CEO of The Center on Colfax, in a recorded message provided to Denverite.
The Center on Colfax is a nonprofit providing free programs year-round for the LGBTQ community. It held its first LGBTQ+ Pride celebration in 1974, and the Center was formally founded two years later. Now, the parade gets about half a million visitors each year.
This year, Denver Pride is scheduled for June 28 and June 29.
We don't know which sponsors are no longer involved
Denverite’s efforts to get more detail on the money coming in for the weekend Pride festival, the Center’s largest event, were unsuccessful.
The interim president declined to provide greater detail on which sponsors are no longer involved or by how much individual giving had declined.
“We recognize that providing a full list of sponsors and dollar amounts is important to your larger story, but our team is unable to do so at this time, or offer on-the-record comments beyond our original statements,” Zanoni said in an email. “However, we can offer the current figure of being $230,000 behind in funding when compared to 2024.”
Zanoni also denied a request to provide a full list of funders.
“We believe that focusing too much on numbers and calling out sponsors by name encourages more negativity and shame, and we do not want to portray ourselves as an organization in need of pity, especially with our audience’s mixed feelings surrounding sponsorships,” Zanoni’s statement says.
In 2024, Pro-Palestinian protesters briefly interrupted last year’s Pride Parade, calling on organizers to cut ties with corporations and businesses they said supported Israeli attacks in Gaza.
Some members of the LGBTQ community have questioned the inclusion of certain corporate sponsors in Pride celebrations for years.
In a separate email, Zanoni noted that giving from sponsors has dropped by nearly two-thirds for this year’s parade as compared to last year.
"When looking at organizations who sponsored Denver Pride in 2024 and returned at lower levels in 2025, on average their contributions have decreased by 62 percent," she wrote.
Fundraising for Pride isn’t just for the parade, but also for the Center’s 5K race, a festival and programming throughout the year.
Still, Zanoni is hopeful new sponsorship might lessen the blow of falling fundraising.
“Thanks to the work of our team, we have been able to bring on new sponsors to help lessen the gap,” she said.
The organization would not elaborate on who the new funders were.
Pride funding drops nationwide
Other cities have seen drops in funding for Pride parades, too. USA Today reported last month that San Francisco Pride has also seen a dip in corporate sponsorship, including from large companies like Comcast and Anheuser-Busch.
The New York Times reported last month that nationwide, many longtime corporate sponsors are either scaling their support for Pride way back or ending it completely — at least partially because of President Donald Trump’s fight against DEI initiatives.
