4 December 2024
Pride Month takes place every year during the month of June, and is a time to spread awareness and celebrate the LGBTQIA+ community. We’ve celebrated Pride Month before at smartclip, but this year we partnered up with our new DEI Committee to come up with a few special ways to show our pride.
The first way we chose to celebrate was by creating special Pride-themed T-Shirts. The shirt featured the word “Proud” which was printed in a rainbow fill across the chest. Proud was chosen to symbolise that we are proud to support the LGBTQIA+ community, and the rainbow fill was used because the rainbow — more specifically the rainbow flag — is an important symbol to the community.
The T-Shirts weren’t the only place where we showed our pride, we also created special email banners which featured the same “Proud” design. What was special about the banners was that they also promoted the use of pronouns — another important aspect of the LGBTQIA+ community — by including a place for employees to input their choice of pronouns.
Aside from visible signs of our support, we also worked to educate the smartclip community on the history behind Pride Month. The DEI Committee shared weekly posts across our internal communication channels highlighting important and influential LGBTQIA+ trail blazers that have helped make the Pride we know and love today possible.
Lastly, smartclip has always seen and valued the importance of giving back to the community, which is why we created the “Social Day”. The Social Day gives employees the opportunity to take the day off of work to give back to the community or a cause that is important to them. In honour of Pride Month, we encouraged all employees that felt the cause was important to them to use their social day to volunteer at an allied charity or foundation.
Tolerance, acceptance, and celebration of differences are key smartclip values that we aim to embody daily. We hope that these initiatives were not only fun for our employees but also served as reminders of these important values. We had a great time celebrating Pride Month this year, and can’t wait to celebrate next year! 🏳️🌈