Project Rainbow Utah’s Impact in 2025
We often saw a hostile political climate at the local, state, and national levels in 2025, yet despite those challenges, we are thrilled to say our community came together and helped us grow and reach more LGBTQ+ Utahns.
We exceeded our growth goals in 2025 with 6,223 flag sign-ups across all of our campaigns. This outpouring of support for queer Utahns helped us increase our revenue to $240,000, up from $205,000 in 2024. This will allow us to reinvest more than $50,000 back into our Community Fund Grant in 2026 with support for pride festivals and more than 30 events across the state in various categories.
We look forward to even more growth and expanded access to affirming programs in 2026, and we are grateful to each and every one of you for helping us fulfill our mission to empower and uplift LGBTQ+ individuals throughout Utah by fostering visibility, promoting inclusivity, and providing crucial support through our Community Fund.
Let’s take a look at some of the wins from 2025 before we head into 2026
Flags and Volunteers
We surpassed our 2025 goals for flag signups and observed growth in both our mailed flag programs and sales of flags through our merch store. As the pressure from state and national leaders amps up against queer Utahns, mailed flags are a great way to support our programs even if you don’t feel comfortable flying a flag outside your home or don’t want to deal with theft or vandalism.
No matter which option folks choose for getting a flag, the proceeds raised from these efforts are reinvested in our Community Fund to support more projects, festivals, and programs that make queer Utahns feel accepted and celebrated.
In 2025, we saw:
6,223 flag signups across all of our flag campaigns
775 of those flags were mailed
An additional 407 flags sold through our merch store, mostly SLC’s new Sego Belonging and Visibility Flags
With Utah lawmakers banning pride flags on schools and government property, Salt Lake City stepped up and designed pride flags featuring the city’s sego lily and designated them official city flags, which allows them to be flown anywhere the ban on traditional flags applies. We are grateful to them for standing up to efforts to stifle LGBTQ+ representation.
Not only did our flag campaigns outperform our goals for the year, we were also touched to see an outpouring of support from dedicated volunteers. We are so grateful to everyone who gave their time and energy to help cover the state in pride flags for our campaigns.
In 2025, we saw:
446 registered volunteers
We estimate more than 800 participants, as many folks ride along on a flag route with a registered volunteer
This amounts to approximately 1,030 volunteer hours, a gift of time valued at more than $35,000
This support is more than just symbolic; it helps us create tangible infrastructure to grow and expand on our mission and make more spaces available to our queer community.
These efforts helped us expand our footprint in 2026, reaching 13 Utah counties as well as the Navajo Nation with flags, events, and increased support.
Community Investment
This year, we reached more people in more places. We partnered with more than 40 community organizations, coalitions, and events. We also expanded our efforts in storytelling, earning more local and national media placements, from CNN to the New York Times, than ever before.
Thanks to your support, our Community Fund Grants awarded 32 organizations with more than $36,000 in funds. These awardees created a wide variety of spaces and connections for the LGBTQ+ community in Utah, with events from film screenings and poetry nights to weekly meetups and performances like concerts and drag shows.
Beyond these grant awards, we extended over $18,000 to pride festivals and other long-term partners. This brings our support to more than $54,000 in 2025, and more than $400,000 since our founding in 2018. These additional partnerships included:
$2,000 for the Trans Day of Visibility Community Celebration
$500 cash and $500 in kind for Lavender Graduation with First Baptist Church, U of U, SLCC, and Westminster students
$500 to support the Weber State Lavender Graduation
$500 for Aqua Underwear Workshops plus free space allocations
$3,000 for Trans Awareness Week programming
$1,000 program support to SLC Pride
Sponsorships across the state, including Davis County Pride, Ogden Pride, Logan Pride, Navajo Nation Pride, and Short Creek Pride
We provided unrestricted grants, sponsorships, and mutual aid to grassroots leaders, student organizers, rural advocates, and queer artists. Our funds filled the gaps created by anti-DEI laws, flag restrictions, and campus policy rollbacks. This investment protected our community’s dignity when institutional support was rescinded.
Our programs provided direct access to belonging. This means trans flags flying during HB 77’s ban, a drag performance at the Utah Cultural Celebration Center, and Lavender Graduations that continued when universities were blocked from hosting them by legislation.
Between grants and additional funding, we provided almost $60,000 in funds and in-kind donations to organizations within Salt Lake County. In keeping with our goal of reaching more Utahns in rural areas, we distributed $14,350 to grantees outside of Salt Lake County and another $16,000 in direct support and in-kind donations. We hope to expand our reach to folks who lack support and traditional sources of funding even further in 2026.
Our work offered symbols of safety in environments where safety has been politically contested.
Internal Investment
As we grow our programs and expand our support, we are also making steps to make sure that growth stays sustainable for the long term. This includes bringing on more staff and focusing on providing equitable pay to members of the LGBTQ+ community, ensuring that as we grow we are offering opportunities to queer folks who may struggle to find other forms of employment.
These investments in 2025 include increasing our capacity with a paid Operations Project Manager, stipend positions for volunteer leadership roles, and a contracted communications strategist.
With these new resources, we hope to expand our reach, improve our operations, and better manage the logistics of flag campaigns: from distribution and collection to responding to misdeliveries or flags that are lost to theft or vandalism.
Looking Ahead With Hope
While 2025 posed new challenges, these obstacles became springboards for opportunity. When HB 77 banned pride flags on public property, our city leaders responded with official Salt Lake City flags, and sales of those flags helped us reach even more Utahns than before. Many people reached out to us for pins, shirts, or sego flags to gift to teachers, government workers, and others who felt constrained by this new legislation and who, nevertheless, decided to find a way to stand tall and show their support.
When our legislature tried to ban DEI Initiatives on campuses, we stood up with our partners to co-host Lavender Graduations for students at Weber State, the University of Utah, Salt Lake Community College, and Westminster University. We are looking forward to partnering with these same leaders at Ogden Pride, Mildred Berryman Institute, and faculty and staff at Salt Lake County-based colleges and universities.
In times of distress and uncertainty, it was not uncommon for us to see a surge in volunteers as people who are frustrated with the direction our leaders are heading decided to turn that energy toward making a difference, showing up in droves to assemble and distribute flags to support vulnerable queer Utahns.
We hope to see this energy continue in 2026, and we are committed to doing everything in our power to rise to the occasion and continue empowering and uplifting LGBTQ+ Utahns with more events and programs that prioritize love and acceptance over fear and hate.
Thank you again for being with us in 2025. We hope you’ll join us in 2026 as we fight even harder for our community.
