Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Greg Jamiel. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Greg, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Can you talk to us about serving the underserved.

I live in Washington state in the Snoqualmie Valley, located about 35 miles East of Seattle, in a small rural town called Carnation. The Snoqualmie Valley is comprised of 7 small towns. Rural towns typically have a reputation for not being as welcoming to the LGBTQ+ community, and I wanted to show how our small Valley communities were actually very welcoming. I knew there were many of us living here, but we had no organization to help create safe spaces for our community…so, Snovalley Pride was born! Since our launch, we have hosted a number of social events that have been been wildly successful with massive community support. These events include Trivia Nights, Drag Shows, and our first ever Pride Picnic. We expected around 100 people, and a little over 300 showed up!

We asked local businesses to hang Pride flags for the first time and all but 2 enthusiastically agreed! During our Pride Month festivities, under the cover of darkness, two people tore down and stole the flags in town. The beautiful thing that happened was residents in our town went out and bought all new Pride flags and pinwheels and within a few hours, all…and more…of the flags were back up and flying high. Hate has no place in our small town and our residents fiercely agree with that. We have heard from LGBTQ+ community members about how they never thought they would see the day we had Pride flags flying high in our community. It has been so heartwarming to see people feel safe, seen and welcome in our town. They are becoming friends, building their support systems, and standing a little taller which is a beautiful thing. Our community of allys has been absolutely amazing, supportive and encouraging and we are so grateful for them!

This fall we have launched an ambitious season of educational community events, wellbeing events like yoga nights, social events like Drag Shows, and so much more! Our mission is to honor the unique and diverse voices living in the Valley, to strengthen and build our community by providing safe spaces to gather, and to celebrate queer voices and perspectives in local arts, music and culture. We are a fiscally sponsored project of A Supportive Community for All, and all gifts to Snovalley Pride are tax-deductible to the full extent of the law.

Greg, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

One of my oldest friends is moving away next month, and as I watched my own friendship circle shrink, I felt the need to create a space where our LGBTQ+ and ally communities here in the Valley could gather to meet like-minded people. The ultimate goal would be to create new, lasting friendships and thus strengthening the safety and wellbeing of our overall community.

We live in a world that has become so divided and filled with fear, hate, and misinformation. We are doing what we can to help bring joy, safety and comfort to our community when many states are trying to enact laws directly targeting our LGBTQ+ community. It only takes one voice to start a movement and create tangible change in our small towns, and it has been so beautiful to see more voices adding to this movement of love, inclusion and hope.

Education and visibility are two ways we can achieve these goals. When someone in the LGBTQ+ community sees a Pride flag on a store, or in a town, it sends a message that we are safe and welcome there. We can be ourselves without fear of hate or abuse. We have witnessed the immediate shift in the feeling of our town when we put the Pride flags up. We have also witnessed the hate that does not want to see those flags. While that population is the minority, they tend to be the most vocal and aggressive.

This work is for our younger generations. Many of us LGBTQ+ adults grew up in a time when it wasn’t safe to come out, or we would live under the threat of being tossed out of our families. It’s important to remember that it has only been 8 years since marriage was made legal for all Americans. We don’t want this younger generation of youth to have to go through the same self-hate, isolation, and fear we went through just a few years earlier.

Recently, we have seen a dramatic uptick in anti-LGBTQ+ bills, attacks and crimes in our country. We at Snovalley Pride are committed to doing whatever we can to stop that hate from leaching into our community, and creative safe spaces for our communities and allies to simply be the best expression of ourselves, live peacefully and enjoy our lives.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

An important group we want to focus on as we build Snovalley Pride are the supportive local small businesses. It has been said, ‘Equality is Good Business’, and we have absolutely found that to be true. We created a unique process of connecting and supporting these local business allies. We created a Safe Space Directory of local businesses who allow us to put up a small ‘Snovalley Pride Safe Space’ sticker on their door. We then add then to our website on our ‘Safe Space Directory’ page. When we host events, we ask these local businesses if they would like the opportunity to sponsor our event with a ‘brought to you by’ tagline. We keep these sponsorships affordable and they have quickly been snatched up for every event!

We also promote job openings from our local businesses in our ‘Safe Space Directory’ to help them find good, qualified people from our community. Our LGBTQ+ community has powerful buying power and we host meet-up groups to shop at, dine in and support these local businesses as well. We will choose one local business each month and meet up for dinner to show our appreciation and gratitude for their support, by supporting them in return.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

As a new organization, building our presence on social media was a priority. We followed the typical protocol of consistently posting about relevant topics, and we found some good organic growth with that. We also advertised our socials at all of our events. But, we didn’t see the big jump in engagement until we leveraged our newsletter with our socials.

Our first four events were completely free to the public as we had zero idea of what the turnout or interest would be. Come to find out, we had sell out crowds at every event we hosted. Our Drag Show sold out (at 80 tickets) in two days, and we ended up with 78 people on the waitlist for that event! Our events have become so popular that they sell out in days.

What we’ve ended up doing is encourage everyone to sign up for our newsletter and follow us on our socials. Before we make tickets available for events, we post about it on our socials and send out a newsletter. Those people get the “heads up” ahead of time and are able to secure their tickets. Then we run an ad and the rest of the tickets go. By advertising events through our social channels and newsletter first, the people in our community who want to be at these events have a chance to get their tickets…and at the same time it is building our audience on social media with heavy engagement.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://snovalleypride.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/snovalleypride/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/snovalleypride