With Major Sponsors Out, Who Is Stepping Up to Support Pride?

Citi, Lowe’s, Mastercard, PepsiCo, Target, and Walmart.

These are but a handful of the major corporate sponsors who have backed out of supporting Pride celebrations across the country this year.

In a climate increasingly hostile to LGBTQ+ people, many corporations renounced their commitments to Pride festivals and events parallel to dissolving their DEI initiatives. According to The Advocate, even before President Trump renounced DEI through executive order, “dozens of major companies had already abandoned their practices. Many made their decisions after conservatives online specifically targeted them for their policies and threatened boycotts.”

As The Advocate wrote, “In abandoning DEI, companies also ceased many of their community partnerships. This included small businesses, minority- and women-owned businesses, and organizations supporting underserved groups: veterans, people of color, and LGBTQ+ people.” Some corporations—like Anheuser-Busch, which sponsored Pride in its home city of St. Louis, MO for more than 30 years—have backed away from their commitments after decades of support.

“We are finding another path to the celebration…but the fact that we have to maneuver in this way is disappointing.”

In the wake of the sudden shortfall, some June events have been canceled. But many others have continued on in defiance of the current political climate and in the true spirit of Pride: celebrating equality and LGBTQ+ people’s resilience. So how have queer and community groups made up the lost support for Pride?

Canceled Events

As far back as April, some major Pride events slated for this summer were canceled amid a flurry of government changes and ensuing fears of reprisal. The Kennedy Center canceled a week of events timed for the WorldPride festival in Washington, DC.

June Crenshaw, deputy director of Washington, DC’s Capital Pride Alliance, which disassociated itself from the Kennedy Center after the cancellations—and after the announcement that Trump was unanimously elected the Kennedy Center’s new chair—told The Associated Press, “We are a resilient community, and we have found other avenues to celebrate. We are finding another path to the celebration…but the fact that we have to maneuver in this way is disappointing.”

For some LGBTQ+ groups, the lack of corporate contributions can mean up to six-figure budget deficits.

Michigan’s Rochester Pride was canceled, reportedly due to the cost and the IRS status of the sponsoring nonprofit which did not allow them to accept community donations. Cancellations also befell Pride celebrations in Idaho; Illinois, and West Virginia. Outside the United States, the United Kingdom’s large Liverpool Pride festival was canceled as well, due to “rising costs and difficulty securing national and local funding,” according to PinkNews.

How to Make Up the Shortfall

How much do sponsors help with Pride? According to CNBC, for some US LGBTQ+ groups, the lack of corporate contributions can mean up to six-figure budget deficits, a huge shortfall for organizations already operating with much less support than in previous years, and under increased scrutiny from the Trump administration.

And Pride can be expensive. With various large activities often stretching over days including parades, street festivals, children’s activities, lectures, performances, softball games, prayer services, yoga, drag shows, and resource fairs that draw massive crowds, the price tag can stretch into the hundreds of thousands of dollars—not to mention the cost of permits, parking, sanitation, cleanup, cooling and first aid stations, and crowd control.

Ohio’s Stonewall Columbus Pride, which serves about 700,000 attendees per year, annually costs half a million dollars. This year, long-time major corporate sponsors such as Walmart, Nissan, and Anheuser-Busch backed out, leaving the nonprofit with a six-figure hole in its operating budget for Pride.

But the Columbus community and other supporting partners of the nonprofit stepped up, increasing their contributions. According to the Columbus Dispatch, this amplified support helped “to bridge the financial gap. There should be no direct impact on 2025’s pride events due to corporate pullouts.”

Stonewall Columbus Executive Director Densil Porteous told the paper, “Those (companies) who probably only saw this opportunity as a marketing moment have backed down, and we are sorry to see them go. But we are thankful for those partners who continue to support us.”

Rethinking Support

In New York City, about one-quarter of the corporate supporters of Pride have reduced or completely ended their contributions, citing fears of retaliation from the Trump administration against companies supportive of queer rights, as well as general economic worries.

The swift corporate backlash against Pride has caused some nonprofits to rethink their reliance on corporate dollars.

Heritage of Pride, the nonprofit that organizes NYC Pride, announced a grassroots, peer-to-peer fundraising appeal to try to make up the lost funds, writing in a statement that the 25 percent hole in its budget “means more than just fewer floats, vendors, and performers at our events. This means that tangible support for our community is in jeopardy, like our grant programs supporting local LGBTQIA+ nonprofits and our year-round programming to bolster corporate support for queer New Yorkers outside of Pride Month.”

The statement went onto say that the Pride budget shortfall “also puts at risk our ability to hire a private security firm and de-escalation teams, born from very real community concerns around police presence at our events.”

The swift corporate backlash against Pride has caused some nonprofits to rethink their reliance on corporate dollars in the first place. This year, Cincinnati Pride refused sponsorships from past corporate partners based on the companies’ weak discrimination policies and poor track records of queer community involvement and employee support.

The Ohio group’s Development Director Jake Hitch told CNBC, “With everything happening politically and in 2025 that is consistently coming against our community, we thought, what better time to really reset our expectations and align with our community on what they want to see?”

Similar moves were taken by Seattle Pride and Twin Cities Pride, which dropped corporate sponsors Boeing and Target, respectively. For the Twin Cities nonprofit, 75 percent of the budget has been made up of corporate sponsorships in the past. But this year, the organization turned down $50,000 from Target, hot on the heels of that company’s cancellation of its DEI programs.

Twin Cities Pride Executive Director Andi Otto told CNBC, “It did not feel right for my community to accept that money.”

The group made the decision to drop Target early, in January, launching a fundraising appeal on social media to try to make up the shortfall. And in less than 24 hours, it did, nearly doubling its fundraising goal, raising almost $100,000 and proving that, in any month, a community can be more powerful than a corporation.

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