Our Story

Happy Valley Pride is an award-winning, LGBTQIA+ led and community-driven arts charity. We bring together a wide range of ages, sexualities, genders, ethnicities and abilities in a creative celebration of equality & diversity, platforming more than eighty artists and reaching over thirteen thousand people annually. Based in Hebden Bridge we serve not only the LGBTQIA+ communities and allies in the valley of Calderdale, but also visitors from across the UK and beyond. 

We are powered by a team of five part-time staff, over fifty community volunteers and a board of trustees. We deliver:

Annual Festival: In late July, we deliver a week-long Queer arts festival and Pride in rural Hebden Bridge and the surrounding areas, featuring national & international artists as well as championing local talent. 

Prism Youth Programme: Our pioneering youth programme reaches over three thousand young people through primary and secondary schools and is led by our own young people, culminating in the Youth Pride Takeover during the festival. 

Year-round events and campaigns: Throughout the year we run a diverse range of events and workshops for all ages of equal quality to our festival, bringing new & emerging queer art to our audiences as well as cherished big name acts. We organise campaigns that positively affirm the queer community and ensure some of our most vulnerable members get support, such as ‘Stand By Your Trans’ and the arts driven mental health project ‘Mind Your Head’.

Our History and Our Journey.

The catalyst for starting Happy Valley Pride was a piece of homophobic graffiti seen in the town of Hebden Bridge in the summer of 2015. This was a reminder that we are still fighting for equality, even in one of the most LGBTQIA+ welcoming towns in the UK. Four locals founded Happy Valley Pride and agreed on a mission:

“To celebrate LGBTQIA+ life in Hebden Bridge and surrounding areas. Promoting equality and diversity to eradicate discrimination, based on sexual orientation and gender identity, through arts, education and engagement.”

2015 - 2017

With the help of local artists, we turned the offensive graffiti statement into an art piece of celebration and acceptance. Sally Wainwright launched Happy Valley Pride early in 2016 where we proudly displayed the artwork to our community and allowed everybody to add their own messages of hope. Human rights activist Peter Tatchell became our first Patron, later to be joined by trans activist and founder of Trans Creative Kate O’Donnell.

Soon we were running monthly socials, building our volunteer team, and planning our first Pride Arts Festival which took place in 2016 at Hebden Bridge Town Hall, we started delivering school assemblies sowing the seeds of our Youth Engagement Programme.

Soho Theatre Associate Producer & agent Tim Whitehead joined our team, and we were able to start bringing the crème de la crème of cutting-edge LGBTQIA+ talent to our town and in 2017, we presented our first 7-day Queer Arts Festival & Pride.

2018 - 2019

We began programming national and internationally renowned acts including Olivier Award Winners Duckie and we won funding from Arts Council England, National Lottery Awards for All, Hebden Royd Town Council, Community Foundation for Calderdale. We introduced a new format: 7 days of queer arts with events throughout the week and a Pride celebration at the weekend.

We started running several successful campaigns including our ongoing Stand By Your Trans campaign (founded by Kate O'Donnell and Trans Creative). By the end of 2019, we had over 50 volunteers, 8 trustees and 3,000 people were attending our events per year.

2020 - 2022

When the Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2020 we moved our events online and hosted virtual shows from big names like Drag Race winner Jinkx Monsoon, lesbian singer Horse McDonald and US trans pioneer Justin Vivian Bond, watched by 8k people. 

We started Mind your Head, a partnership with local community charity The Brunswick Centre, creating a resource on our website around LGBTQIA+ mental health. We joined Queer Arts North, a network of leading, northern LGBTQIA+ organisations.

In January 2021 we became a registered charity and created a small operational team, with an Artistic Director, General Manager and Youth Engagement Officer running the charity, and our Youth Engagement Project grew engaging with 1700 young people. We produced the Happy Valley Pride Weekender in September - our first live event since the pandemic!

2022 - present

This period was quite a step change for us, which started following a successful application to Calderdale Council for three years’ funding as part of their Culture Fund. This meant we could really start becoming sustainable.

We increased our audiences by 50% reaching 7,000+ people over the festival and 2,000+ children via our Youth Engagement Project. Our Big Day Out grew and we presented our first ever Youth Pride Stage created for and by young people. 

We also welcomed Horse McDonald and Jackie Kay as patrons, and we won the Arts and Culture Award at the Calderdale Community Spirit Awards 2023, as well as being nominated for Charity of the Year.

By 2024 we were chosen as one of 8 key commissions for Calderdale Council’s year of Culture – Culturedale, this allowed us to pilot several strands of our work that we hope will continue: Volunteer task and finish group, Youth Pride committee and access forum.

During 2024 and 2025 we started taking over the whole of Calder Holmes Park for the Big Day Out, which welcomed 7,100 in 2025. 

Members of our team spoke to Gay Times, who said Happy Valley Pride has ‘a particular focus on arts, education and engagement, and have become a fundamental part of queer life in the area’.

Annually, the festival as a whole engaged with over 11,000 people in 2025, and we now programme high profile performers including: Jeanette Winterson; Jacob Alon; Le Gateau Chocolat; Cocoa Butter Club; Cheddar Gorgeous; Olivier award winners The Tiger Lillies and winner of the BBC's Drag Race UK Ginger Johnson. Our Youth Engagement Project worked with over 3,000 young people and 20 schools/youth groups. Our year-round events attracted over 1000 per year. In total, we directly engaged with over 15,000 people in 2025!

The future is very exciting as we plan our 10th birthday in 2026.

BE HERE, BE YOU, BE PROUD!