Across the country, people are watching the places they call home become sites of surveillance, criminalization, and state violence. The events in Minneapolis are not isolated moments, they’re part of a broader pattern of rising authoritarianism and militarization that is destabilizing communities nationwide.
Here in the Northwest, increased federal presence in Washington and Oregon alongside escalating attacks on LGBTQ+ people, organizers, immigrants, and journalists have made safety feel untenable. For too many, home is no longer a place of comfort or belonging — it’s a place of vigilance and fear.
These moments force us to ask hard questions about what home really means, who is allowed to feel safe, and what it takes to protect the places and people we love.
Home Is a Feeling Shaped by Policy and Power
Last year, Pride Foundation centered Homecoming as a way to remember who we are and where we belong. Through conversations, shared reflection, and community events we explored home not as a fixed location, but as a feeling created through care, connection, and belonging.
Home, we learned, is where you feel safe enough to exhale.
It’s being seen without having to explain yourself.
It’s knowing you don’t have to navigate the world alone.
But this moment demands that we be clear: while home can feel like many things, it is also a condition shaped by systems. Who gets to feel at home — and who doesn’t — is influenced by policing, borders, housing access, and laws that criminalize identity, speech, and survival.
For LGBTQ+ people — especially trans folx, immigrants, people of color, and those living at the intersections of multiple systems of harm — home is something that must be actively protected, not passively assumed.
Homecoming mattered. In a time of uncertainty, it helped us reconnect to Pride Foundation’s 40-year history and remember that home can be created intentionally through relationships, mutual care, and shared responsibility.
That grounding was essential. Because homecoming wasn’t the destination, it was the foundation.
Last year, homecoming helped us remember what we’re fighting for. The moment we are in now asks us to decide how we will fight for it.
From Homecoming to Action
At Pride Foundation, our vision is clear: a world in which all LGBTQ+ people live safely and openly as our whole selves in the communities we call home. That vision is still aspirational, not because it is abstract, but because the conditions for its possibility are not yet fully realized. Those conditions are still contested by policies that invalidate and criminalize our existence, threatened by systems that normalize violence, and constrained by forces that create fear and isolation.
When the conditions that make home possible are under threat, neutrality is not an option.
This is where ACTION comes in.
Action is how we protect the right to live openly and safely as our whole selves.
Action is how we resist policies and practices that strip dignity and security from our communities.
Action is how we show up for one another — materially, politically, and relationally — when systems fail.
Across our region, we are already seeing what this looks like: neighbors supporting neighbors, organizations adapting in real time, and communities refusing to abandon one another even in the face of heightened threats. As we move forward into 2026, we do so with clarity and resolve.
Pride in Action: Sustaining Our Movement
Responding to this moment requires more than momentary urgency. It requires long-term thinking and sustained response. It requires the ability to show up not just now, but consistently into the future. It requires stability in a landscape defined by change and uncertainty.
That’s why Pride Foundation is stepping into this next chapter by showing our Pride in Action.
Pride in Action is not just a campaign. It is our deep commitment to long-term support and care for LGBTQ+ communities across the Northwest. It is our recognition that the threats facing our movement aren’t temporary and that our response can’t be either. As organizations face mounting pressure, shrinking resources, and increasing hostility, sustaining the work that advances safety, advocacy, and builds power for our communities requires flexible, reliable, and long-term support.
Through Pride in Action, we’re investing in the capacity of our community and our movement: ensuring grassroots organizations have the resources to plan beyond crisis; supporting students as they build their futures; and shifting the narratives about transgender, Two-Spirit, nonbinary, and intersex communities who are doing courageous work on the frontlines of these hostile environments.
Pride in Action is not about responding to a single moment; it is about being prepared for everything that lies ahead. It is one way we turn the belief in homecoming into the practice of action and ensure that LGBTQ+ people across the Northwest can organize, live, and thrive in all the places we call home.
If you’re looking for tangible ways to support this work, you can learn more about Pride in Action or choose to sustain LGBTQ+ communities across the Northwest through a recurring gift.