Below are Out & Equal CEO, Erin Uritus’, remarks from the 2022 Global Pride Forum. You can watch Erin’s remarks and view highlights from the event here.

Welcome to our 2022 Global Pride Forum where we have brought together our partners and friends from all over the world to come together and celebrate Pride with us. I am so honored to be a part of this important event today with all to address this quarter’s timely topic: The Bonds We Forge Together.   

Although we’re celebrating together today, we know that Pride events happen year-round all over the world, and while Pride may be one opportunity to bring our community to the center of the conversation, we need to practice this all the time, in every office, on every team, and with our family and friends. 

In planning for this event and discussing it with our partners in the U.S., Latin America, EMEA and APAC, thinking about how we should approach our global Pride event this time around, one theme rose to the forefront in every, single, conversation. And that was – hope. We’ve been through so much together over the past few years. As a reflection of that, I spoke with you all at last year’s Global Pride Forum when the theme was “Pride and Resilience”. But this year, what we need most is hope and inspiration.

And what better source of hope and inspiration than to reflect upon the bonds we’ve forged together as a global LGBTQI+ community. Even in the face of adversity, we come together, across our differences, across borders, across generations, to come together and celebrate Pride. Working as a community of LGBTQI+ people and allies, we have:

• Signed onto corporate statements that urge our governments to protect our rights, like the one Out & Equal organized in 2018 and is organizing again now to demand respect for LGBTQ+ people during the 2022 general elections in Brazil. 
• We’ve pushed the envelope on inclusive policies in our workplace to create spaces of belonging for everyone, as seen by the full 91% of Fortune 500 companies that now have gender identity protections enumerated in their nondiscrimination policies (up from 3 percent in 2002). 
• We’ve formed ERGs, BRGs, affinity groups and DEI councils that become the new norm in the workplace and are catalysts for positive culture shifts – both in and out of the workplace – affecting internal sense of belonging and building bridges with local community partners. 
• And we have lifted the voices of leaders from around the world to advance more adaptable glocalized solutions to workplace inclusion, de-centralizing a Western approach to DEI work, which is why Out & Equal works in partnership with Business Inclusion Councils around the world to produce multilingual toolkits and guides. 

While we reflect upon and honor this progress, giving credit both to ourselves and all of the LGBTQ heroes that came before us, of course we know that there is still much work to be done. But we are no good to the movement, if we are not good to ourselves…so, our theme for this year is a reminder that we should celebrate the fact that we are stronger when we work together. In fact, we’re unstoppable – which is actually the theme of this year’s Workplace Summit.  

Thank you all for joining today’s event and for everything you do for equality.