Badge Of Pride

A nonprofit organization

$309 raised

12% complete

$2,500 Goal

About

Our Work

Preserve Queer History. Fuel Cultural Power. Make Change Real.

Badge Of Pride advances LGBTQ+ history as public knowledge, public culture, and public power. In just three years, we've grown from a grassroots idea into a nationally recognized force in North Texas's cultural fabric, activating a collection of 10,000+ artifacts and welcoming thousands into spaces where Queer history is visible, accessible, and alive in the present.

Our landmark exhibition Badge Of PRide: From Silence to Celebration! — the largest artifact-centered LGBTQ+ history exhibition ever presented in Texas — drew more than 3,000 visitors to the Irving Archives & Museum. Free admission. Gender-inclusive Spanish translation. Deep community partnerships. People came for the history. They stayed for the connection, the context, and the sense that their lives belong in the record.

Our Work, Recognized
- American Alliance of Museums — Museum Impact Award, 2026
- International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences — Anthem Awards, Silver, 2025
- Academy of Interactive & Visual Arts — Communicator Awards, Award of Excellence, Immersive & Experiential
- Texas Association of Museums — Mitchell A. Wilder Publication Design Award, Gold

Why It Matters

Across Texas and around the country, LGBTQ+ stories are being stripped from classrooms, libraries, and public life. This is a decisive moment: either history contracts, or it expands. Your support ensures it expands.

When you give to Badge Of Pride, you help protect irreplaceable artifacts, capture voices that have never been recorded, and bring Queer history into the spaces where it's urgently needed. You are fueling visibility, education, and cultural understanding at a moment when all three are under direct attack.

Memory Into Momentum

Our programs don't preserve the past for its own sake. They put it to work. From statewide oral history work in Deep in the Heart to our performance series CORRESPONDENCE: Letters of Queer Resistance, Love & Revolution, we partner with artists, writers, historians, elders, and young people to animate history and speak directly to the present.

We design at the intersection of art, activism, and historical truth, creating work that moves people, provokes dialogue, and expands what the cultural record can hold.

Centering The Full Story

Badge Of Pride's work centers the full breadth of LGBTQ+ experience, across race, gender identity, disability, class, age, and geography. We prioritize the histories of Black, Brown, Indigenous, trans, nonbinary, disabled, immigrant, and rural Queer Texans whose stories have been underserved or erased.

Equity is the framework for everything we protect, present, and imagine.

Your investment carries LGBTQ+ history into the future. It moves stories from the margins to the center and ensures that future generations inherit a record that reflects truth, courage, creativity, and community.

Mission

Badge Of Pride collects and activates artifacts from LGBTQ+ history to inform, enrich and engage the power of the contemporary Queer experience.

Needs

At Badge Of Pride, we are building one of the most ambitious LGBTQ+ public-history efforts in Texas. Your partnership keeps Queer stories visible, protected, and part of the cultural life of our communities.

Your support powers the next phase of Badge Of Pride’s work: taking "From Silence…To Celebration!" on the road to communities across Texas and the South where Queer history is often inaccessible; expanding community programs like Say It Loud, CORRESPONDENCE, and our art-activism workshops; and advancing "Deep in the Heart," our statewide rural oral-history project documenting LGBTQ+ lives at risk of disappearing without action now.

You also help safeguard our growing archive of 10,000+ artifacts through digitization, preservation, research, and public access—ensuring these stories remain protected, interpreted, and woven into the cultural life of our communities. Your investment carries LGBTQ+ history forward and makes it reachable where it’s needed most.

Equity Statement

Badge Of Pride is built on the understanding that the Queer community has never been one story. It is many histories, many identities, many lived realities—shaped by race, gender identity, sexuality, disability, class, age, immigration, geography, and experience. These intersections are not peripheral to our work; they are the foundation of it.

We acknowledge that the historical record has been shaped by systems that decide who is seen and who is pushed to the margins. Racism, transphobia, misogyny, ableism, xenophobia, and class inequity have influenced what is preserved, what is dismissed, and whose lives are treated as worthy of memory. These forces have harmed not only society at large but the LGBTQ+ community itself.

Our commitment is to confront those inequities directly. We ground our work in accountability, transparency, and a practice of community-centered decision-making. We prioritize the voices and leadership of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color; trans and nonbinary communities; disabled Queer people; immigrants; and those whose histories have been systematically denied space.

Through exhibitions, oral histories, public programs, and partnerships, we aim to reshape who carries authority in historical storytelling. We work to expand access, bridge generational and cultural divides, and ensure that the historical record reflects the full breadth of LGBTQ+ life.

Equity is not a statement for us—it is the process, the practice, and the path. And it guides every artifact we preserve, every story we uplift, and every community we serve.