## **Bi Pride UK** ## **TRUSTEES ANNUAL REPORT AND FINANCIAL STATEMENTS FOR THE YEAR ENDED 31/12/2022** **Registered Charity Number: 1177128** **Bi Pride UK** **(Registered Charity Number: 1177128)** ## **TRUSTEES’ ANNUAL REPORT 31/12/2022** The Trustees present their report and financial statements for the year ended 31/12/2022. The Trustees believe that the financial statements comply with current statutory requirements and the Charity’s governing document. ## **REFERENCE AND ADMINISTRATIVE DETAILS** **Charity Name:** Bi Pride UK **Charity Number:** 1177128 **Trustees:** A Kay (Chair) (interim Secretary 21/02/22 to 31/05/23) R Davey (Vice Chair) N Batley (Secretary) (Resigned 17/01/22) E Pooley (Secretary) (Appointed 31/05/23) A von Spreckelsen (Treasurer) A Bond Z Brewster (Resigned 14/08/22) A Ayinde-Lawal (Resigned 25/09/22) R Afflick (Resigned 17/01/2023) S Gossage (Appointed 31/05/23) C Appenteng (Appointed 19/06/23) S Engineer (Appointed 31/05/23) S Jivraj (Appointed 21/08/23) **Company Secretary:** N Batley (until 17/01/22) A Kay (interim 21/02/22 to 31/05/2023) E Pooley (from 31/05/23) **Registered Office:** 5 Caledonian Road London N1 9DX **Bankers** : Lloyds Bank Plc 120 Lewisham High Street Lewisham London SE13 6JG Page 1 **Bi Pride UK (Registered Charity Number: 1177128)** ## **TRUSTEES’ ANNUAL REPORT 31/12/2022** ## **STRUCTURE, GOVERNANCE and MANAGEMENT** Bi Pride UK is a Charitable Incorporated Organisation registered on 12/02/2018. ## **PUBLIC BENEFIT** The trustees have complied with the duty in section 4 of the 2006 Act to have due regard to guidance on public benefit published by the commission. ## **OBJECTIVES and ACTIVITIES** To promote equality and diversity for the public benefit and those belonging to one or more minority identity. Particular focus is on the elimination of discrimination against people self-identifying as or assumed to be attracted to more than one gender (including but not exclusively bisexual/romantic, pansexual/romantic, and polysexual/romantic people) by: - Raising public awareness of issues and difficulties faced by people who experience - attraction to more than one gender; - Celebrating, respecting and highlighting the diversity of communities of people - who experience attraction to more than one gender; - Staging a periodic multisexual (‘bi pride’ festival, and smaller events throughout - the year; and - Such other objects as are charitable under the laws of England and Wales as the - management committee shall in their absolute discretion determine. ## **ABOUT BI PRIDE UK** Between ‘gay’ and ‘straight’, there are so many shades of attraction beyond gender. We seek to create spaces for anyone who falls into that spectrum or thinks that they might. Our community is vibrant and vivid, and people adopt many different labels to identify themselves, or even choose not to use labels at all. Whether you use bi, bisexual, biromantic, pan, pansexual, panromantic, poly, polysexual, polyromantic, queer, fluid, heteroflexible, homoflexible, something totally different, a combination of these, or even no label at all, we’re here for you. Bi Pride UK’s mission is to create spaces where people who experience attraction beyond gender can be freely visible and celebrate themselves and their identities. It’s not enough to be ‘welcome’ at a Pride. We make up a very large proportion of the queer community – many stats actually say we’re over half the community – and we deserve to be visible and celebrated in our own right. Page 2 **Bi Pride UK (Registered Charity Number: 1177128)** ## **TRUSTEES’ ANNUAL REPORT 31/12/2022** ## **ACHIEVEMENTS and PERFORMANCE** ## **Introduction** As we look back across 2022, the ongoing effects of the Covid pandemic have left their marks, but we have taken what makes us stronger as a charity at our heart committed to community engagement and accessibility. As a volunteer team, 2022 was another challenging year, with a shrinking team capacity across the year as members of the team needed to step away from their voluntary commitments, and limited resources available to recruit new volunteers. This is a trend seen across the wider charity sector, and although it made aspects of maintaining our previous levels of internal and external work difficult at times, the resilience of the core volunteering team allowed us to continue to achieve things of which we are very proud. Being able to return to an in-person flagship Pride event was made all the more exciting for the three-year wait, but retaining the virtual element from our lockdown events through a livestream gave us what we believe is unique in the Pride space: a hybrid Pride. Thanks to this format, we met our 2019 Pride attendance numbers (1,300 people: the largest single day bi-specific event anywhere in the world) between those on site and those watching from elsewhere. Other 2022 highlights were the launch of both the Bi Community Fund and the Unicorn Fund, and being shortlisted for the ‘Community or Charity Project of the Year’ Award at the 2022 DIVA Awards. ## **Our objectives** 2022 was the middle year of a three-year strategic period, for which our key objectives are: 1. Increasing our organisational sustainability and continuity as a whole; 2. Embedding anti-oppression across the charity, both in internal processes and in service delivery, and being accountable on this; 3. Using our platforms and spaces to amplify and centre the most marginalised voices within bi communities; 4. Growing our recognition as an expert voice for bi communities in the UK, but never speaking on behalf of these communities; 5. Developing systems and tools to express our impact more clearly and comprehensively; 6. Building collaborative ways of working across all service delivery teams to foster innovation and creativity; 7. Working locally and collaboratively with bi people and communities across the UK. As in 2021, with the ongoing impacts from the pandemic, we have kept our specific objectives within each of these areas flexible to be reactive to the Page 3 **(Registered Charity Number: 1177128)** ## **Bi Pride UK** changing circumstances. We have achieved successes against our seven core objectives. By this measure, 2022 has also prepared us well for going into the third and final year of this strategic period in 2023. ## **Our volunteers** Bi Pride UK continues to be an entirely volunteer-run charity, and we would not be able to deliver our work without these amazing people donating their time to a cause they feel passionately about. As mentioned above, the trend in 2022 was one of declining volunteer numbers, with several long-standing volunteers moving on from the charity and limited capacity to recruit for any but the most operationally critical roles, but this did not hamper us continuing to deliver for our community. We successfully filled a few critical volunteer roles across the year, including the recently vacated Heads of Volunteer Management and Media and Communications roles, and the UK Prides Manager role which had been vacant since the death of Simon Cremen, one of our founding volunteers, in 2021. In the second half of 2022, our Treasurer gave us notice of leaving the role with a commitment to remaining in post until we could recruit a new Treasurer, but this role has proved difficult to recruit, as several other vacant Trustee roles (Secretary, Events Trustee and Fundraising Trustee) have also been. This led to us engaging Charity People as a specialist charity recruitment agency, beginning in early 2023 beyond the scope of this report. In the 2023 financial period, we successfully recruited two Trustees through Charity People (the Events Trustee and Fundraising Trustee roles) as well as filling the Secretary role and several other Trustee and ‘Head of’ roles independently. The declining volunteer numbers trend has been reversed considerably, though as of writing in October 2023, recruitment for the Treasurer role is still live and our outgoing Treasurer is still in post. ## **Our engagement and impact** Bi Pride UK’s three strategic pillars of work are our events work, our education and outreach work, and our communications work. This section gives an overview of what we have achieved in these three areas in 2022. ## Bi Pride UK events After our 2020 and 2021 virtual events, we were delighted in September 2022 to bring our flagship Pride event back in-person at a new London venue, Queen Mary University’s Mile End campus. Having delivered three virtual events, and having grappled from our inception with the question of how to reach people beyond those able to attend a single-day event in the capital city, delivering Bi Pride 2022 as our first hybrid Pride with both of our stages livestreamed throughout the day made perfect sense. It also offered people who are more vulnerable to the effects of Covid a way to engage with the day and still be with their community from the safety of their own homes. This format was extremely Page 4 ## **Bi Pride UK** ## **(Registered Charity Number: 1177128)** popular, with a combined attendance across in-person attendance and virtual engagement with our livestreams of 1,300 people: as many as attended our inaugural 2019 event. It also provided a way for people busy on the day to catch up with the day’s content after the event in their own time via our social media platforms. We have decided to retain the livestream as a standard fixture for all future flagship Bi Pride events. Bi Pride 2022, as in 2019, featured two stages: the Main Stage, with a full-day schedule of performers; and the I Am Proud Stage, hosting panel discussions on intersectional topics across bi community experiences. On the Main Stage, we had Ru Paul stars River Medway and Victoria Scone headlining, with Sadie Sinner, founder of the Cocoa Butter Club, as stage host across the day. Sadie stepped in at the last minute for Lilly Snatchdragon who sadly got Covid the day before the event. On the I Am Proud Stage, our panels covered topics including non-monogamy, being bi in the workplace, faith and spirituality, and trans experiences. We are proud of being able to create a space for such open and vulnerable conversations. Both stages allowed us to showcase the best of bi community talent and shine a spotlight on the topics that are important to our communities. We had two notable new features at the 2022 event. One was a designated Remembrance Space; this quiet corner with a memorial book was a place away from the bustle of the event to reflect on those we have lost. We also hosted our first Bi Book Fair in collaboration with bi authors Vaneet Mehta and Lo Shearing, with The Common Press selling a range of queer books. Two slots on the I Am Proud Stage were also part of the fair, with a panel on publishing as a bi author and a slot with several authors doing readings of their work. The fair was extremely popular and well received, and we decided it would make a return in 2023. As in 2019, we put considerable budget and effort into making our event more accessible. As before, we had BSL interpretation on both stages, a Mobiloo unit available for people who need more facilities than a standard accessible toilet provides, free water available across the site and free sanitary products in all toilets (which were all de-gendered for the day). We also had a sensory room on site, and for 2022 invested in our own equipment for the room so that we would have this available for all future events. In 2022 (and in perpetuity) we named the sensory room for our much-missed volunteer Simon Cremen, having used money raised in his memory to purchase the equipment. New in 2022 was having a dedicated team of Access Assistant volunteers in yellow t-shirts based around the site to support anyone with additional access needs. We were also very grateful to work with the queer accessibility consultancy Quiplash to improve accessibility, including commissioning a consultant to carry out a site visit to identify additional changes we needed to make to the venue to make it more accessible for disabled attendees, and having disabled awareness training for our volunteers in advance of the event. We faced some challenges in relation to the event. In some ways we were starting from scratch with this second in-person flagship event, having lost a lot of the momentum from our first event to the pandemic. In particular, the limited Page 5 ## **Bi Pride UK** ## **(Registered Charity Number: 1177128)** volunteering capacity outlined above was challenging, both in the run-up to the event and in terms of on-the-day volunteers at the event itself. However, our team achieved an incredible result despite this, and we were supported for the second year by a paid freelance events project manager who was able to fill some of this capacity gap. We also had some issues with the venue facilities, with some of the toilets we had hoped to use being unavailable due to building works, and the lift to the Main Stage breaking down temporarily during the day. However, after the event, with assurances from our venue that these issues would be resolved during the year, we were happy to lock in the venue again for 2023’s event, allowing us to start event planning for the following year much earlier than we had previously been able to do. ## Community engagement Our heavily reduced volunteer team was felt especially acutely in the Education and Outreach team, where we have no volunteers at all until the very end of 2022. This left us extremely limited in our capacity to deliver this area of work. We are therefore even more proud of what we were able to achieve here. In pre-Covid years, we would get out on the road visiting other Prides around the UK, especially Prides where there was no other local bi community presence. This was not possible in 2020 as in-person Pride events were not taking place, but we had taken a decision in 2021 that we would not carry out this part of our work in 2021 because of the risk our volunteers would be under to go to large events, even those run with Covid-safety precautions. In 2022 we did not uphold a blanket decision over all Prides attendance, but with very limited team resources, we only attended one Pride: Pride in Ely. In late 2022, we filled the UK Prides Manager role, a crucial step towards resuming our important Prides engagement work in 2023. Continuing our partnership with Consortium, the LGBT infrastructure charity, from 2021, we participated in the planning process for the Bi Community Fund; this fund, the first of its kind in the UK, was created using funds we earmarked from the 2021 donation from Tesco. We were involved in conversations about the format and structure of the fund and the application process involved to access it. We were also part of the recruitment process for the community-led decision making panel, reviewing and shortlisting applicants, interviewing candidates with a representative from Consortium, and choosing the make-up of the panel. We were very pleased with the diversity represented in the panel composition (and therefore the grants decision making process), including geography, race, gender and history of involvement in queer and bi activism. Our Chair and a bi member of staff from Consortium are also part of the grants panel. The fund itself was ready for launch in January 2023, beyond the scope of this report. Also within the scope of our community engagement work is our training and consultation offer, which is available to all corporate sponsors as part of their sponsorship package, as well as being available for stand-alone training sessions. In 2022, we delivered one of the latter, participating in a panel on bi visibility with a media company, alongside internal speakers and a volunteer from UK Black Pride. Similarly, our outreach work around creating the panels programme on our I Am Page 6 **(Registered Charity Number: 1177128)** ## **Bi Pride UK** Proud Stage at our flagship event was a great opportunity to connect with and amplify people across the wider community. For example, hosting panels on faith and spirituality in the bi communities, on being both bi and trans, and on the varied experiences of non-monogamy and queerness gave a platform to some incredibly complex and nuanced experiences across the diversity of our bi communities. ## Communications The Media and Communications team also experienced very low volunteer capacity for much of 2022, but despite this we managed to secure valuable coverage of our flagship Bi Pride event across queer media in the run up to the event, on the day and in follow up. We were featured in at least two London universities’ Pride season round-ups to their students and staff (Queen Mary University where the event was held, and Middlesex University, who attended the event and also featured us in their post-event round-up) and an article by QX Magazine, and included in an article by Shivani Dave on QueerAF about supporting grassroots Prides. Additionally, in August our Chair was interviewed for the Bisexual Brunch podcast, talking about the upcoming flagship event and reflecting on bi erasure and the importance of bi visibility. Our communications and virtual work is a central strategic theme for Bi Pride UK as a charity, and being able to livestream our flagship event is an important part of delivering this. As outlined above, both the Main Stage and the I Am Proud Stage were streamed throughout the day, with almost 600 people tuning across our different social media platforms. With this material almost all available on our platforms after the event itself, as of December 2022 the I Am Proud Stage recording had been viewed more than 1,400 times - this demonstrates a strong demand for the conversations our event was able to facilitate, and an incredible reach beyond a single day in-person event. We also saw significant social media engagement throughout the day and in the days and weeks following the event. Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London, tweeted a celebratory message for Bi Pride from both his own account and the official Mayor of London account on the day of the event, and various organisations including DIVA, Pink News, QueerAF and Queer Britain also shared celebratory messages with the community across the day. DIVA continued their coverage of the event after the day, with a video blog published on their social media and a summary of their experiences at our event featured on their podcast. Posts and messages across social media from people participating on the day, both those there in-person and those tuning in online, were also extremely positive: _‘I went to [Bi Pride] this year and it was the first time I’d been surrounded by ‘people like me’ (and simultaneously so diverse). I really recommend it as an experience, it was such a feeling of relief and belonging’_ (Twitter) _‘Hi BiPride team, I just want to convey my deepest appreciation for this livestream, in a time when events are all going back to physical-only. I came out during the pandemic, because I got access to events and resources that were not_ Page 7 ## **Bi Pride UK** ## **(Registered Charity Number: 1177128)** _available in the conservative Asian country where I live. Thank you for being my source of #BiJoy in a place when it can get very lonely’_ (Facebook) _‘Had a lovely Saturday volunteering at [Bi Pride] as one of their Accessibility Assistants, supporting attendees and their access needs. Something that really struck me was the number of young people who attended the day with their families and flew their LGBTQ+ flags proudly. I reflect on when I was their age and I was completely clueless about what I was feeling… It makes me happy that young people have spaces and access to information to explore and understand their identity.’_ (LinkedIn) Beyond communications directly linked to our flagship event, we also saw valuable engagement with our work, allowing our bi visibility and inclusion messages to reach a wider audience. 2022 marked the 50th anniversary of the first Pride march in the UK, and Bi Pride UK was featured as part of this celebration in the queer community. Amongst the mentions we are aware of, we were featured in a Gay Times article about ‘The story of 50 years of Pride in the UK through 50 trailblazers’, and also in Stonewall’s ‘After fifty years of Pride, what should we fight for next?’ article. Our Chair and Vice Chair were also given valuable platforms to promote the charity’s purpose and work. Our Vice Chair was interviewed on the Consortium’s podcast in June 2022, talking about Pride month and our work, and gave a quote for Pink News’ coverage of the forced outing of actor Kit Connor in late 2022, and our Chair has been commissioned by Vaneet Mehta and Lo Shearing (our partners on the Bi Book Fair) to contribute a chapter on the history of Bi Pride UK for their upcoming anthology exploring UK bi activism being published in 2024. ## Unicorn Our extremely successful online magazine Unicorn also had a good year in 2022. In February, we published Issue 9 (‘Sex’), featuring 21 articles exploring everything from destigmatising disability-inclusive sex to shining a light on intimate partner violence in India. In July we published Issue 10 with the theme of ‘Punk’, with 16 articles looking at how queer culture is challenging the establishment, whether through the independent music scene, tattooing and body art, or through the fetish and kink communities. A major milestone for Unicorn in 2022 was the April launch of our Unicorn Fund, a pot of money set aside to ensure that creatives contributing to the magazine were being paid for their content. Until that point, we had been reliant on contributors being willing to donate their time and content, but it had been an aim to reach a point where creativity and labour were being adequately compensated. While the core Unicorn team continues to be volunteer-led, this fund will be factored in as part of the Unicorn project budget going forward, and the ‘Punk’ issue was the first time that Unicorn contributors were paid. The Unicorn team saw the same impacts as the wider Bi Pride UK volunteer team across 2022, with several of our longer-standing volunteers needing to step away from their roles. As a result, after the 10th issue, we put Unicorn on hiatus, giving Page 8 **(Registered Charity Number: 1177128)** ## **Bi Pride UK** the team time to review the success of the previous three years and plan a more sustainable publication going forwards. ## **FINANCIAL REVIEW** Bi Pride UK continued to be financially strong in 2022, though with a more modest income than the anomalous income figures for 2021 (inflated by a one-off £80,000 donation from Tesco). Our income for 2022 was £23,319, and though our expenditure for the year exceeded this more than twice over at £66,496 (of which £51,300 was spent on our flagship event), we nonetheless finished the financial year with £52,814 in the bank. £30,000 of this was our designated reserves. Because our income total for 2022 is below the £25,000 threshold, we did not need to arrange an independent examination on our accounts. In the first part of the year, we carried out a sponsorship package review with our corporate contacts, including some who had sponsored us in 2021 and some from previous years. This allowed us to assess the value of our benefits package and how we could offer more appealing value to the companies we work with, and informed the process of setting the 2022 sponsorship packages. In 2022, we were supported by one Silver corporate sponsor (EY) and five Bronze sponsors (Arup, Credit Suisse, GSK, Environment Agency and Sky). Of all these, all but Arup and GSK were returning sponsors. The total value of our sponsorship income for 2022 was £14,000, although due to overlapping invoicing periods from 2021 and not all 2022 invoices being paid within the 2022 financial period, the exact figures for sponsorship do not align to our reported corporate sponsorship income in this financial period. In the 2022 financial period, we were also very grateful to be in receipt of several generous donations. Towards the end of the year, some friends and former colleagues of our late volunteer Simon Cremen organised a fundraising gala dinner in his memory, and alongside Mermaids and the Samaritans, we were chosen as one of the beneficiary charities. This donation was also match funded by the Lloyds Bank Foundation, where Simon had previously worked. Additionally, we were one of the featured charities of the D&I Leaders LGBT+ at Work Conference 2022, and received a donation in lieu of a speaker fee for one of our long-standing supporters Harry Queenborough. We also benefited from a modest but healthy stream of income throughout the year from individual donors through various donation platforms, including voluntary donations from our event attendees when booking a free ticket for our flagship event. ## **RESERVES POLICY** Our reserves remain at a £30,000 level, the lowest cost of a single year’s flagship event. ## **FUTURE PLANS** Having emerged strong from the difficult years of lockdowns, unpredictability and restrictions, the Bi Pride UK team is excited for the opportunities that the future Page 9 ## **Bi Pride UK** ## **(Registered Charity Number: 1177128)** holds. Having been able to deliver a very successful in-person Bi Pride event in 2022, we are looking forward to being able to focus on how future events can build on the momentum of being able to run the event every year (we hope) without interruption! We will also continue to commit considerable resources to making our events more and more accessible every year. The focus for 2023 is strongly on building the volunteering team back up to strength. With every new volunteer, there is more that we are able to do as a charity and greater impact that we can have. Additionally, the more robust we can become as a charity, the closer we get to our longer-term aim of having paid staff members carrying out some of the work currently delivered by volunteers. Alongside this, we are looking forward to building up our fundraising and income generation capacity, particularly around diversifying our income streams to give us greater financial resilience in the years to come. 2023 is the third and final year of the current strategic period, so there will be a focus on determining our direction for the next three years of Bi Pride UK’s journey, 2024-2026. This will be an exciting process, as we have achieved a great deal since our formation in 2017 and much more in the current strategic period than we could have hoped for in the world we have found ourselves operating in, and there is so much more we can achieve. We look forward to bringing our communities on this journey with us. Page 10 **Bi Pride UK (Registered Charity Number: 1177128)** ## **STATEMENT OF TRUSTEES RESPONSIBILITIES** The Trustees are responsible for preparing the Trustees Report and the financial statements in accordance with applicable law and United Kingdom Accounting Standards (United Kingdom Generally Accepted Accounting Practice). Charity law requires the Trustees to prepare financial statements for each financial year which give a true and fair view of the state of affairs of the company as at the end of the year and of the surplus or deficit of the company for that period. In preparing those financial statements, the Trustees are required to: - select suitable accounting policies and then apply them consistently; - make judgements and estimates that are reasonable and prudent; - observe the methods and principles in the Charities SORP; - prepare the financial statements on the going concern basis unless it is - inappropriate to presume that the company will continue in business; - ● state whether applicable UK Accounting Standards have been followed, subject to - any material departures disclosed and explained in the financial statements. The Trustees are responsible for keeping proper accounting records which disclose with reasonable accuracy at any time the financial position of the charity. They have general responsibility for taking such steps as are reasonably open to them to safeguard the assets of the charity and to prevent and detect fraud and other irregularities. This report has been prepared in accordance with the Statement of Recommended Practice – Accounting and Reporting by Charities (FRS 102 - 2019). This report has been agreed by the trustees on 29 October 2023 and signed on their behalf by: Avi Kay (Chair of Trustees) Page 11 ## **Bi Pride UK** ## **(Registered Charity Number: 1177128)** ## **STATEMENT OF FINANCIAL ACTIVITIES FOR THE YEAR ENDED 31/12/2022** Page 12 ## **Bi Pride UK (Registered Charity Number: 1177128)** ## **STATEMENT OF FINANCIAL ACTIVITIES (CONT.) FOR THE YEAR ENDED 31/12/2022** Avi Kay 29/19/2023 Page 13