The Second Pride Festival is coming – for more details please go to our website.
I would like on behalf of the board of the Second Pride Festival, welcome you to Second Pride 2014. It has been a long and exciting year building up to this point and on behalf of the board I would like to thank everyone for their support.
I would appreciate your indulgence for a moment as I want to talk briefly about community and what it means to me.
I have said in the past and I continue to believe that we as members of the LGBTQ community and our allies and supporters need to respect one another and work towards goals that benefit the greater good.
Within any large and diverse community as this one that we were elected to represent there will never be 100% support for everything. We as a board have worked very hard to make the adventure leading up to the Festival as enjoyable as we could for as many people.
Our community within SL and outside is a strong and vibrant group that is moving forward to benefit the greater good. We as a group can learn from each other. Pride isn’t about one group of people or one club, or even one lifestyle within the group. Its about all of us.
Please – Enjoy the festival and the community that we represent, those that are here and those who are not.
Petr Vanbeeck
2014 Presiding Chair, Second Pride Festival
Confessions of a Digital Daddy Bear 
Most people do not realize that Linden Lab does not donate land to Second Pride for putting on the Festival. In the past, they have charged Pride huge amounts of money for renting sims that were on old servers with bad performance. From what I understand (and I may be wrong here), much of the funds available from fundraising went to purchase the main Pride sim, and upgrade the Pride experience so people would have less lag when the come. I thing this was a great idea and would like to see more things like this happen.
I do want to bring up one more thing. One year, a few years back back, funds were contributed to Amnesty International. I thought this was a very bad idea back then (Amnesty ended shutting down their LGBT effort that Pride contributed to anyway from what I understand anway) since this organization is not PRIMARILY geared to LGBT needs and issues. I hope if real world organizations are to be benefited, ones will be selected which directly help LGBT people, not serve specific political agendas, and can be trusted to handle funds correctly. It is also important to select organizations which are vetted and contribute over 95% of funds raised specifically to people in need, and not to administrative overhead, such as the Aids Committee of Toronto that you mention here.