that go into it and people, yeah.

- Well, Erik, I wanna talk to you next.

The festival that you're most closely associated with, not as long running, but Pride Festivals have been growing in popularity, growing in attendance throughout major cities throughout the U.S., but also here in small towns in Pennsylvania.

What's important about that?

What makes you proud about Pride Festivals growing?

- Yeah, so, you know, I'm a Pocono native, right?

I was born and raised here.

And, you know, things change as time goes on.

So what I think is really beautiful about the Pride Festival is that it is reinforcing the culture that was already in the Poconos, but now it just creates a space for us to celebrate.

- Tell us more about the Pocono Pride Festival.

How long has that been running?

What kind of role do you have?

And what kind of impact does it have on the community, both the economics and broader impact on the community?

- Yes, so the Pride Festival, we started, our first initiative was in 2019 to have flags hung up throughout town.

And then in 2020, we actually did have our first event.

It wasn't in June, it was in September, and we held it at a separate location that was comfortable having us during COVID.

But then in 2021, we decided to hold it in Courthouse Square for downtown Stroudsburg, which is a really nice symbolic space because it's the county seat for the County of Monroe.

So if you're actually looking at the stage and you look through the stage, you'll see our courthouse behind you.

- How important is symbolism like that?

- It's really important, it's really important.

I actually received handwritten letters from some older folks who never believed this was gonna happen in Stroudsburg, and they're very happy that it has.

- So five years in, what do you hope the Pocono Pride Festival five years from now is like?

How big, how many people, what's ahead being planned?

- Yeah, so we are kind of limited.

We've expanded and grown the event each year, and we've kind of hit the capacity for the number of vendors we can fit in Courthouse Square.

We've used all the side streets and as much space as we could.

One of the challenges for our event is we are nervous about some maybe not as proud members who attend.

So we wanna make sure that we're maintaining a very safe event and have emergency vehicles stationed throughout the event with easy egress, but also a secure event that vehicles and people can't get into it.

So for the Pride Festival specifically, there's a whole additional safety layer that we have to plan into it.

But economically speaking, it's a rather fun event.

In downtown Stroudsburg, a lot of events are held on Saturday.

For us, Sunday is a free parking day.

So we decided to take advantage of that and we have our event on Sunday.

And the other reason why we've planned it that way is so attendees behave themselves a little bit better.

If you have it on a Friday night or a Saturday night, things might get rowdy.

So our event is just held Sunday afternoon, nice and easy in the daytime and it's a safe and colorful event for all.

- Sounds like you've put a lot of thought, you and the other organizers do put a lot of thought into this and that's intriguing the additional concern for safety that goes into designing and celebrating a Pride Festival.

- It sounds like a challenge with all the safety measures, but it's actually a great opportunity because we now have the state police, the local police departments and the sheriff departments and the fire department, of course, all participating in the event.

So yes, they're there for safety, but they're also there for outreach.

So it's a nice opportunity for the whole community.

- That's an important connection to make in a community.