2023-12-31-accounts - Bi Pride UK

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Bi Pride UK

TRUSTEES ANNUAL REPORT AND FINANCIAL STATEMENTS FOR THE YEAR ENDED 31/12/2023

Registered Charity Number: 1177128

Bi Pride UK

(Registered Charity Number: 1177128)

TRUSTEES’ ANNUAL REPORT 31/12/2023

The Trustees present their report and financial statements for the year ended 31/12/2023.

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 Baylas (previously Kay) (Chair) (interim Secretary
	21/02/22 to 31/05/23)
	R Davey (Vice Chair)
	E Pooley (Secretary) (Appointed 31/05/23)
	A von Spreckelsen (Treasurer) (Resigned 17/02/24)
	K Barnett (Treasurer) (Appointed 01/02/2024)
	A Bond
	R Affick (Resigned 17/01/2023)
	S Gossage (Appointed 31/05/23)
	C Appenteng (Appointed 19/06/23)(Resigned
	12/10/2024)
	S Engineer (Appointed 31/05/23) (Resigned 23/05/24)
	S Jivraj (Appointed 21/08/23)
	A Lipley (Appointed 15/01/2024)
	A Changa (Appointed 15/07/2024)
Company Secretary:	A Kay (interim 21/02/22 to 31/05/2023)
	E Pooley (from 31/05/23)
Registered Offce:	5 Caledonian Road
	London
	N1 9DX
Bankers:	Lloyds Bank Plc
	120 Lewisham High Street
	Lewisham
	London SE13 6JG

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Bi Pride UK (Registered Charity Number: 1177128)

TRUSTEES’ ANNUAL REPORT 31/12/2023

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.

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Bi Pride UK (Registered Charity Number: 1177128)

TRUSTEES’ ANNUAL REPORT 31/12/2023

ACHIEVEMENTS and PERFORMANCE

Introduction

Across 2023, a consistent theme has been growth and resilience, with incredible successes being delivered by a team of fantastic and dedicated volunteers. We came into the year with a team close to the smallest size that we had seen in our seven-year history, a lingering impact of the early years of the pandemic, but we came out of it with an expanded team and a significant list of successes. We have also learned a great deal about how we can continue to improve our work, especially in terms of how to make both volunteering for Bi Pride UK and our flagship event more accessible.

The flagship event this year was also the first time that we have run a full-scale flagship event in two consecutive years, due to the impacts of Covid in 2020 and 2021. Witnessing the momentum that this created, and seeing our attendee growth from 2022 to 2023, only partly hampered by train strikes on the day, was an important validation of the need for events such as ours. We also continued to see growth on all of our social media platforms, and an increase in those reaching out to us as experts in our field to deliver training in their workplaces, and we are glad to see that wider queer organisations and corporate LGBTQ networks are recognising the importance of investing in bi inclusion work.

2023 also saw the release of some powerful statistics from the 2021 Census, similarly demonstrating the scale of the communities we support. While anecdotally the community already knew that there were as many bi and pan people as there are gay and lesbian people in the UK, seeing this demonstrated in such extensive datasets has felt empowering for our communities, and all the more so when we see that there are twice as many bi and pan young people as their gay and lesbian peers. We are only scratching the surface of the people who may find benefit and community from our work, and this gives us plenty to look forward to in the future.

Our objectives

2023 was the final year of a three-year strategic period, for which our key objectives are:

Increasing our organisational sustainability and continuity as a whole;
Embedding anti-oppression across the charity, both in internal processes and in service delivery, and being accountable on this;
Using our platforms and spaces to amplify and centre the most marginalised voices within bi communities;
Growing our recognition as an expert voice for bi communities in the UK, but never speaking on behalf of these communities;
Developing systems and tools to express our impact more clearly and comprehensively;

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Bi Pride UK

(Registered Charity Number: 1177128)

Building collaborative ways of working across all service delivery teams to foster innovation and creativity;
Working locally and collaboratively with bi people and communities across the UK.

As we come to the end of our current strategic period (2021-23), and we reflect back over the previous years, we see that our most successful prediction for this period of time was that it would be predominantly unpredictable. We have intentionally kept our specific objectives within each of these areas flexible to be reactive to the changing circumstances, and we feel that these seven areas continue to reflect what we want to achieve as an organisation. They therefore will also form the basis of our strategic planning for the new strategic period to come in 2024-26.

Our volunteers

Bi Pride UK is an entirely volunteer run charity, as it has been since it was founded, which means that all of the huge successes we have made over the last year are thanks to the amazing volunteers who go above and beyond to give their time. Our organisational structure has a team of trustees, where each trustee is associated with a different team across the organisation and works alongside the Head of that team (for example the Secretary working with the Head of Volunteer Management). Within teams there are also volunteers responsible for different areas of expertise, such as a Research and Impact Manager in the Education and Outreach team and a Creative Designer in the Media and Communications team.

After a few very challenging years in terms of volunteer numbers, 2023 saw a huge increase in our team size, with 21 new volunteers starting with us across the year. We recruited our first Volunteer Manager to support the Head of Volunteer Management, and this then meant we had a lot more capacity to increase volunteer recruitment across the charity. This included the recruitment of our first ever Fundraising team members, as well as the creation of a new Head of Organisational Development position. We also expanded many of the teams to include new roles and existing roles that had been vacant for some time.

Due to ongoing difficulties with recruiting trustees into certain positions, we engaged Charity People, a specialist charity recruitment agency, to help us with recruiting for the Treasurer, Events Trustee, Fundraising Trustee and Secretary roles at the beginning of 2023. Through this agency, we filled the Fundraising and Events Trustee roles, as well as appointing a Head of Fundraising from among the candidates, and we also concurrently were able to successfully fill the Secretary role from direct applications. By the end of 2023, all of our ‘Head of’ roles were filled. At the end of the year, the Treasurer role remained unfilled (although our outgoing Treasurer remained in post until we filled the role in February 2024, beyond the scope of this report). We also applied to the BoardLead programme at the end of 2023, with the hope of recruiting an IT and Digital trustee, although this process (again beyond the scope of this report) was unsuccessful on this occasion.

Our Head of Volunteer Management participated in Good Practice in Volunteer

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Bi Pride UK

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Management training delivered by the Jewish Volunteering Network and the Benefact Group between September and December 2023. This was a really valuable experience for the team and for the organisation, and we have been working across the course of 2024 to implement the things we learned from this training, such as introducing volunteer recognition initiatives to improve volunteers’ experiences and satisfaction.

As well as growing the volunteer team in 2023, we were also able to return to a previous model of holding in-person team away days to bring our volunteers together, having not been able to do this since before the beginning of the Covid pandemic. We held two team away days in 2023, one at the beginning of the year in February, and one at the end of the year in November. We used these away days as opportunities for team building and creating connections between teams, but they were also invaluable for the planning process for developing our new three-year strategy for 2024-26. These away days took place in London, with options for people to join remotely, and all volunteer expenses were reimbursed.

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 2023.

Bi Pride UK events

Our flagship Pride event in 2023, on Saturday 2nd September, was back at the Queen Mary, University of London, Mile End campus where we had been in 2022. At the event, we saw the biggest in-person attendance since the beginning of the Covid pandemic, with 1,000 people on-site. This was an achievement in itself, but even more significant due to the train strikes taking place across the country on that weekend. Having introduced a livestream at our 2022 flagship event, which was extremely popular and provided access to the event for several hundred more people than were able to attend in person, we again made this event a hybrid one. Overall, across in-person and online attendance, Bi Pride 2023 had 1,350 attendees. This beat the previous record we had set in 2022, and meant that we were still the largest bi-specific single day event to take place in the world.

After having run two full-scale flagship Pride events in previous years, we have a well-established format for Bi Pride. Our Main Stage had performers of all kinds throughout the day, hosted by the founder of Bitten Peach, Lilly Snatchdragon, and headlined by comedian Sophie Duker. Our panel stage, called the I Am Proud stage, featured discussions on topics of importance to the bi communities such as being bi and aromantic and/or asexual, decolonising bi identities, being bi performers in the drag scene, and bi experiences of sexual violence. We hosted a community hub, featuring 50 stalls run by bi activists and organisations, local and national LGBTQ charities, queer-run independent businesses, and larger corporates. In 2022, we had the first bi book fair in collaboration with Vaneet Mehta and Lake Shearing, and the 2023 event saw this return, complete with book readings and author meet-and-greets.

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Bi Pride UK

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However, we also introduced some new elements to the event in 2023. Our Remembrance Space, introduced in 2022 as a quiet space away from the bustle of the main event for people to reflect on and remember those that had passed, became the Remembrance Space and Multi-Faith Prayer Room. We created a photo zone, with a Bi Pride UK branded backdrop and a variety of Pride-related props such as fans and flags for people to pose with. From a fundraising perspective, we also introduced our first fundraising raffle at the event, with prizes donated by queer businesses, stallholders and others, and ran a sponsors’ reception before the doors opened to the public so that our corporate sponsors and their colleagues could come together and network before the day got busy.

Any Bi Pride event is only able to be a success thanks to the dozens of volunteers who make it happen: the year-round core team of volunteers, and the on-the-day volunteers who join us for a few hours or even the entire day. In 2023 we had 100 on-the-day volunteers across varied roles from stewarding and information volunteers, to backstage and artist liaison volunteers, to accessibility volunteers on hand to offer assistance to any attendee with access needs. We also trialled a new opportunity, encouraging our corporate partners to rally their colleagues to volunteer with us in some way during the day. More than half a dozen employees at Tesco volunteered with us on the day at the event, getting involved with stewarding, backstage support and running the Bi Pride UK merchandise shops – and there would have been more of them had it not been for the train strikes. We received very positive feedback from the Tesco team, and we intend to expand our corporate volunteering opportunities to our corporate partners in the future.

Accessibility is a central principle for us at Bi Pride UK, and we factor considerable costs into our event budget to make the event as accessible as we can, whilst always recognising that there is more we can do and learn. Returning access features for the 2023 event included BSL interpretation on both stages, a mobile changing places toilet unit for people who need more facilities than a standard accessible toilet provides, free sanitary products in all toilets (with all toilets on the event footprint having been de-gendered), a sensory room for people to use whenever they need it, ear defenders available to borrow free of charge, livestreaming the event throughout the day (as mentioned above), and dedicated access volunteers located throughout the site for anyone who needed them. New features at the 2023 event included the multi-faith prayer room mentioned above, a sexual health testing van on site for anyone to use, and the attendance of two welfare officers from the queer-run welfare provision company SafeOnly. All of this is whilst the event was kept free to attend for all.

We recognise, however, that we do not always get it right, and there were some significant issues from an access perspective on the day. These included issues with the lift to the Main Stage preventing wheelchair users from getting on to the stage, which then also meant that parts of the day lacked BSL interpretation. There were also technical failures in the livestream of both stages at several points in the day, taking them offline for large chunks of time and reducing people’s ability to engage with the event remotely. In recognition of the seriousness of these issues, we initiated an accessibility review process shortly after the event,

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Bi Pride UK

(Registered Charity Number: 1177128)

aiming to identify where the issues lay and how we could prevent them from happening again, or mitigate the risks in some other way. Part of this included the decision to seek out alternative venues for future events. The review process extended beyond the period of time covered by this report, but will also become a fixture in the annual rhythm of event planning and follow up for future events and years. The final months of 2023 were spent researching and visiting potential 2024 venues so that we could lock in a date and start promoting it as soon as possible, but the new venue for 2024 was confirmed beyond the scope of this report.

Community engagement

As well as our annual event, we also focus on how we can increase bi visibility and inclusion in other spheres, carried out primarily through our Education and Outreach team. The team, which near the end of 2022 had no team members, grew significantly in strength across the course of 2023, with the recruitment of a new Head of Education and Outreach and a Research and Impact Manager who joined the UK Prides Manager that we had appointed in late 2022. This expansion in capacity opened up the possibility of some really exciting and valuable opportunities for us as a charity.

A key fixture of the annual rhythm of the year for us is our attendance at other Prides around the UK. It is an opportunity for us to reach new audiences, increase conversations about bi experiences and provide a much needed avenue for bi people around the country to feel seen, heard and validated. When we attend a Pride, typically our volunteers will run a stall at the event: giving out resources, selling merchandise, taking donations and answering people's questions about the work we do and why it is needed. Sometimes we coordinate a group to walk together in the march or parade, and we might even be invited to speak on the Main Stage. Often we are the only bi presence at a Pride, and it makes an enormous difference to bi people attending the event, especially the growing numbers of young people identifying under the bi umbrella. In 2023, Luton Pride gave us a speaking slot on their Main Stage, and for the rest of the day we were running a stall in their community hub. This year we also attended Student Pride, London Trans Pride, Sparkle Weekend, Pride in Ely, BiCon and AfroYanga, and our volunteers had some incredible conversations, making connections with groups and individuals across the country.

Another core part of our work is delivering bi inclusion training to a variety of audiences. In 2023, our training clients included NHS England, Carpmaels, the Department for Education, and the House of Commons. Additionally, all of our corporate sponsors have an element of bi inclusion training as part of their corporate sponsorship package, and we delivered training to many of our 2022 sponsors across the course of 2023. Additionally, our Chair was invited to present at a Bi Empowerment Day run by Stonewall in Leeds in September, which was a great opportunity to reach out to new and future leaders and activists in the bi communities. The feedback that we receive on our training and educational sessions is consistently positive, and as well as being a useful source of unrestricted income, this is also a great way for us to reach new audiences and increase the understanding of bi identities and biphobia.

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Bi Pride UK

(Registered Charity Number: 1177128)

Another exciting avenue for us to expand our impact across the bi communities is our £5,000 Bi Community Fund programme in collaboration with Consortium, and launched in January 2023. This programme was the first of its kind, offering micro grants to bi activists and community organisations to fund anything that would help them to afford the important work that they are doing in local and national communities, both in person and online. In 2023, grants totalling £1,500 were offered to a number of bi organisations and bi-focused performing arts projects through this programme: London Bisexual Games, Biscuit, the play ‘Bi-TOPIA,’ the play ‘Two Tribes,’ the London Bisexuals Meetup Group, and the play ‘BoyBi.’ Intended as a pilot, this fund has highlighted a number of key operational challenges within the process of funding bi activists and community groups, particularly the limited number of groups who have a bank account in their name and two or more individuals involved in the work itself (both of which were requirements due to Consortium’s governance limitations in grantmaking). We have continued to review this process in 2024, beyond the scope of this report.

Over the course of 2023, we have also engaged with a number of campaigns across the sector. In January, we were a signatory on an open letter from the LGBTQ sector challenging the Government’s decision to block the implementation of the Scottish Gender Recognition Reform Bill. In June, we signed the #StandWithTrans open letter campaign coordinated by Charity So Straight, which called on charities to stand with their trans and non-binary communities. And in October, we signed a letter coordinated by Stonewall which challenged Suella Braverman's comments that LGBTQ and women refugees are misusing their identities to make false claims. It is important to us that we use our platform and profile to challenge decisions affecting people within our communities, especially those groups who are most at risk from the negative and harmful narratives which are rampant in current discourse.

Similarly, we seek to do what we can to highlight the experiences of the more marginalised communities within an already marginalised space. For example, by hosting a panel at the 2023 flagship event which focused on the experiences of asexual and aromantic bi people, we were able to shine a light on an often overlooked and poorly treated part of the queer community. The conversations that were had were extremely important. We re-shared the recording of this panel on social media to mark Ace Week in October 2023, and the content was also shared by Stonewall at the same time. Similarly, our panels on the I Am Proud stage such as the bi-passing colonial legacies panel and the bi identities in sex work panel shone a light on important narratives and experiences which often go unheard. There was so much demand for the continuation of the bi-passing colonial legacies conversations that we took the decision for the 2024 event (beyond the scope of this report) to feature a follow-up panel on this topic.

We continue to observe a positive demonstration of our growing recognition and reputation. For example the number of clients who approached us for our training, and being called upon by Stonewall to present at their Bi Empowerment Day (as mentioned above) is a strong recognition of our credibility, as is receiving invitations to Pride receptions during the summer, such as one hosted by the

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Bi Pride UK

(Registered Charity Number: 1177128)

Nordic embassies in London. Additionally, there were two conferences hosted by Consortium during the 2023 financial period, and Bi Pride UK was mentioned from the podium at both conferences, including during the keynote speech at the conference in January 2023.

Communications

Volunteer numbers remained low in 2023 for the Media and Communications team, but we successfully recruited four new volunteers into this team. The team achieved some fantastic results and engagement across the year. Our communications work is about so much more than just marketing what we do – by using our website and social media platforms, we are able to contribute to our strategic goal of building virtual communities around the UK for people attracted to more than one gender.

The workload of most teams across the organisation increases as we get closer to the date of our flagship event. For the media and communications team, this includes creating all of the branded imagery which goes out across our website and social media platforms (both as native posts on our own accounts and as assets for performers, speakers and others to share on their own platforms) and designing all of the signage and event related materials for printing. The team also ensures that our event is promoted as widely as possible. In 2023, we secured a short promotional video from pansexual comedian Joe Lycett to be used on our platforms, and this received fantastic engagement. We saw strong engagement on our social media platforms on the day, with a total ‘on-the-day’ reach just across our Instagram Story posts of 25,025 people. Our event was covered by media outlets in the run-up, including QX Magazine and other queer sector press, and both Stonewall and DIVA ran post-event coverage on their platforms.

We saw some beautiful responses to our event on social media, truly highlighting the importance of such an event as we run:

‘I had the BEST day – felt so safe, included, excited, inspired, and giddy with happiness. Didn’t stop grinning all day, and I kept spontaneously giggling’ (Instagram)

‘It was honestly so heartwarming to be surrounded by other bi people and listen to the panel talk about their experiences as bisexual people, So good for the soul!’ (Twitter/X)

‘A fab day volunteering at Bi Pride UK… The bisexual community are consistently erased from our own community and media. Today was all about the beautiful bi people of the UK’ (LinkedIn)

‘Taken me a few days to get over how AMAZING it was! I’ve never hosted something like this before, but what an honour! … thank you so much for having me and the incredible audiences that came and went.’ (Instagram)

Beyond the event itself, we also built our engagement with a number of media

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Bi Pride UK

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platforms and channels across the year. For example, when the 2021 Census results were released in early 2023, we provided a quote for a PinkNews article and were interviewed by a student journalist for Hybrid Magazine in Oxford to provide an expert perspective on the topic. We were also interviewed for a slot on BBC Surrey and BBC Sussex Radio in September, marking Bi Visibility Week, where we spoke about the full extent of the bi community according to census statistics and how the demand for events like Bi Pride is growing year-on-year. While it is clearly important for us to be featured by the queer press, as this is a crucial part of our audience, it feels very important to us that we are also able to engage with media outlets around the country, as it is often through this that we are able to reach audiences which may not otherwise engage with our work in any way or understand much about the complexities of bi people's experiences.

Our own platforms are another valuable way to extend our message and reach new audiences. In 2023, we launched our TikTok account, adding this to the existing suite of social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter/X. We are particularly aware that the demographics using different social media platforms vary, and given the known extent of young people identifying under the bi umbrella, being on TikTok is a valuable way to reach this significant demographic. We use our different platforms in a variety of ways, with a consistent message and brand across them all. For example, September is Bi Visibility Month, and to mark the month, and specifically for Bi Visibility Day (23rd September) 2023, we created and shared a variety of content, including coming out stories, personal reflections on what being bi means to different people, and highlighting various bi celebrities to increase visibility. We saw excellent engagement with this content. Under very different circumstances, we also used our social media accounts to issue a statement in October 2023 which condemned a Government decision to force trans patients in hospitals into the wrong gendered wards. It is important to us that we use our platforms to speak up for marginalised voices, especially those within the trans community.

Our fundraising and governance

We would be unable to achieve the successes outlined above without strong fundraising and governance in the charity as a whole.

Fundraising is becoming increasingly challenging for organisations across the charity sector, and in this context, we have been fairly successful in 2023. From the recruitment we carried out with the agency Charity People (mentioned above), we appointed both a Fundraising Trustee and a Head of Fundraising, and created a new Merchandise and E-commerce Manager role to increase our ability to raise money through selling existing merchandise online through our web shop, at other Prides, and at our own Pride event. We also retained four of our corporate sponsors from 2022 (EY, Environment Agency, Sky and AutoTrader) and received a donation from Tesco, and received extremely positive feedback from all five in relation to their experiences of our flagship event and our other work.

As 2023 was the final year of the 2021-23 strategic period, a significant focus for the year was on preparing the strategic plan for the next three years (2024-26). At our

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Bi Pride UK

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February away day, we reviewed the strategic objectives from the 2021-23 strategy and decided to retain them as we feel there is still more that we can do to achieve greater results. At the November away day, each team presented its vision for the next three years in terms of what they want to achieve and the resources they need to do so, and these plans were synthesised into an overall organisational strategy. At this point, the draft strategy went back to the teams for their review, and was then signed off by the Board as we reached the end of the year. Based on this new strategy, the Head of Organisational Development began work on an organisation-wide project plan, and the Research and Impact Manager started constructing an impact strategy for 2024; both documents were under development and review well into 2024, beyond the scope of this report.

FINANCIAL REVIEW

Bi Pride UK continued to be financially strong in 2023, with a 53% increase in income to 2022. Our income for 2023 was £35,669 which included a donation from Tesco of £15,000. We are also incredibly grateful to have received £10,000 in event sponsorship, all from returning sponsors. In Silver sponsorship we had EY, and our Bronze Sponsors were Auto Trader, Environment Agency and Sky.

In 2023 we focused on expanding other income sources and successfully increased our income for training delivered and speaker fees, as well as generating stallholder fees of £3,575 from the community hub at our event. We also continue to benefit from a modest but stable 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.

The largest expenditure for 2023 was once again our flagship event, with a total cost of £37,940. These costs include venue hire as well as equipment and tech support hire required to present two stages. We pay all performers and panellists an event appearance fee and reimburse performer, speaker and volunteer travel and subsistence costs. A note that the final venue cost invoice for 2023 was only received in 2024, resulting in a lower expenditure reported in the accounts for 2023 than the actual event cost. Other notable expenditure includes an atypical spend on recruitment advertising through Charity People as we needed to expand our recruitment for certain trustee roles.

A final note that in preparation of our 2023 accounts we have identified and wish to correct an error in our 2022 account submission. The closing balance for the Lloyds Savings account was erroneously recorded as being £39,021, when this should have been £36,021, resulting in Section B1 Total Cash Funds not agreeing to the section A Cash Funds at Year End of £52,814.

RESERVES POLICY

Our reserves remained at £30,000, the lowest possible cost of a single year’s flagship event. The trustees plan to review this as the cost of the event grows year-on-year.

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(Registered Charity Number: 1177128)

Bi Pride UK

FUTURE PLANS

At the close of the 2023 financial year, Bi Pride UK was in a healthy position, with a strong amount of reserves, positive relationships with funders, and a large and passionate volunteering team doing incredible work for the charity and for the bi communities as a whole. We have a clear vision for what the next three years will look like, and our plan is to achieve these goals. We have learned from previous years that we should expect the unexpected, but we are in a resilient place to be able to respond to the challenges that may be in our path.

Having decided to move to a new venue for 2024, this is a significant challenge for the future beyond 2023. Crucially, this venue needed to have equitable access to the Main Stage for all performers and BSL interpreters regardless of their mobility needs, and larger areas to dedicate to the community hub to allow for the stalls to be more accessible and navigable for large crowds, with wheelchair and mobility scooter users particularly in mind.

Our online magazine Unicorn has been on hiatus since the end of 2022, and unfortunately due to personal circumstances, a new Managing Editor recruited in 2023 was unable to lead this project forward. We are therefore hoping that in 2024 we will be able to put new plans in place for re-launching this project, although we would prefer to take time to do this right rather than rush the process and find it to be unsustainable. The first action is to recruit a new team, and this will be a focus for 2024.

More broadly across the organisation, our plans beyond 2023 feature a lot of development and implementation of systems and processes, for example developing robust impact measurement frameworks for each team across the organisation, and identifying a suitable CRM system to deploy in a tailored manner for different teams. We also plan for the 2024 financial year to be the first time that we prepare a more community-forward impact report to accompany the financial year’s statutorily-required Charity Commission annual report.

We look forward to bringing our communities on this journey with us.

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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 30 October 2024 and signed on their behalf by:

Avi Baylas (Chair of Trustees)

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(Registered Charity Number: 1177128)

Bi Pride UK

INDEPENDENT EXAMINER’S REPORT FOR THE YEAR ENDED 31/12/2023

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Bi Pride UK (Registered Charity Number: 1177128)

STATEMENT OF FINANCIAL ACTIVITIES FOR THE YEAR ENDED 31/12/2023

Prepared on a Receipts and Payments Basis

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Bi Pride UK

(Registered Charity Number: 1177128)

STATEMENTS OF ASSETS AND LIABILITIES AT THE END OF THE PERIOD FOR THE YEAR ENDED 31/12/2023

Avi Gida Baylas 30/10/2024

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Bi Pride UK (Registered Charity Number: 1177128)

NOTES TO THE ACCOUNTS FOR THE YEAR ENDED 31/12/2023

1. Comparative Expenditure Breakdown

2. Income Breakdown

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