Pride and Purpose: Our First Pride Month Impact at WVU
Photo: From Witty Voices United (WVU) social media campaign for Pride Month
Pride Month may be over, but showing up for the LGBTQIA+ community doesn't end when the rainbows come down. Here's what we accomplished, what we learned, and why our little $36 donation means more to us than you might think.
Hello, WVU family! We hope you had a wonderful Pride Month filled with joy, love, celebration, and plenty of rainbows.
As Pride Month came to an end, we found ourselves feeling a lot of emotions. There is something incredibly beautiful about watching people come together to celebrate the LGBTQIA+ community so openly and freely. The Pride parades, the marches, the concerts, the joy, and the unapologetic celebration of simply being who you are and loving who you love.
It was colorful, it was loud, it was beautiful. And yes, it was a whole lot of fun. But it also got us thinking. What happens when Pride Month ends? We hope the momentum doesn't stop.
We hope we continue speaking up when we see injustice. We hope we continue showing up for the LGBTQIA+ community. We hope we continue fighting for equality, human rights, and the freedom for people to live authentically and love freely.
So this Pride Month, Witty Voices United wanted to do more than post a "Happy Pride!" We wanted to do something that would also make a positive impact. So we decided for our first Pride Month campaign, we pledged to donate 100% of the profits from every purchase featuring our Pride Goddess design to The Trevor Project.
Did everything go exactly as planned? Oh, absolutely not. But this is the story of a growing small business, so buckle up. We're sharing all of it.
Photo: From WVU social media campaign for Pride Month
Why we created the Pride Goddess
The Pride Goddess is our love letter to the LGBTQIA+ community. Every part of her design tells a story.
Her features and colors are inspired by the transgender flag, while her flowing rainbow hair represents the Pride flag. She embodies resilience, beauty, strength, and confidence, much like the community that inspired her.
The white flowers represent innocence and purity because love, at its core, is innocent. Love is not something that needs permission, explanation, or approval. Love simply is.
The Pride Goddess is both soft and powerful because we believe the two can coexist. You don't have to lose your softness to be strong, and you don't have to make yourself smaller to make other people comfortable. And if you look closely at her rainbow hair, you'll find one of our favorite details:
Love Has No Boundaries.
Around here, we love a good hidden message. You'll find little Easter eggs tucked into several WVU designs, including our Fearless Women Collection. Sometimes they're subtle. Sometimes they're... well, not subtle at all.
That's kind of our thing. 😉
These messages represent the thoughts, feelings, and beliefs we carry within us that eventually find their way into how we speak, act, create, and show up in the world. The Pride Goddess is our reminder that love is beautiful in all its different shapes, colors, identities, and forms.
Photo: Pride Goddess design
Why we chose The Trevor Project
For Pride Month, we pledged to donate 100% of the profits from every Pride Goddess tee, sweatshirt, and tote bag purchased to The Trevor Project.
Why them? Because their work matters.
The Trevor Project is a nonprofit organization focused on suicide prevention and crisis intervention for LGBTQ+ young people. They provide crisis services, educational resources, research, and advocacy focused on creating a safer and more accepting world for LGBTQ+ youth.
For young people struggling with rejection, discrimination, fear, or simply trying to understand who they are, having somewhere to turn can make a meaningful difference.
That mission deeply aligns with what Witty Voices United stands for. We believe in human rights. We believe in equality. We believe people deserve to live authentically, love freely, and feel safe being exactly who they are. So when it came time to choose an organization for our first Pride Month campaign, supporting The Trevor Project felt right.
Keeping our promise and being transparent
At the beginning of Pride Month, we made a promise. Actually, we made two. Our first promise was that 100% of the profits from our Pride Goddess campaign would be donated to The Trevor Project. Our second promise was to be transparent with our community.
We want Witty Voices United to be more than a place to buy apparel. We want to build a community based on honesty, trust, and shared purpose. That means we don't only show up when we have impressive numbers and huge wins to share.
So here it is... Our goal was to raise $1,000 for The Trevor Project. Together, we raised $36. Was it the $1,000 we dreamed of? Nope. Not this time. But we still did something we're proud of. We kept our promises. We donated 100% of the profits raised through the campaign, and we're sharing the results openly with you.
We're still a very small and growing business. We're learning how to reach more people, build our community, and create campaigns that can make an even bigger impact.
We hope that one day, $36 becomes $100. Then $1,000. Then $10,000.
Who knows where this journey will take us? But we do know one thing. We have to start somewhere.
Photo: Pride month donation to The Trevor Project
The real journey of a small business
Here's something you should know about Witty Voices United. We're not going to pretend every campaign is wildly successful. We're not going to celebrate the wins and quietly hide the losses. That's just not us.
Building a business from the ground up is messy. Sometimes a post reaches thousands of people. Sometimes the algorithm chooses to mute your content for whatever reason. Sometimes you spend weeks creating something you're incredibly proud of, share it with the world, and hear... Crickets.
That's part of the journey. And we want to share all of it. The good, the bad, the wins, the losses, the exciting moments, the frustrating moments, the pretty, the ugly, and the moments when you stare at your computer wondering what the heck you're doing. Because that's what building something meaningful actually looks like.
One day, we hope to look back at this blog post after we've donated thousands of dollars to organizations making a difference. And when that day comes, we'll remember this little $36 donation with a smile. Because every movement starts somewhere.
This is where ours started.
Stick around. We're just getting started.
We hope you'll stick around and build this with us. Think of this blog as a living journal of Witty Voices United's journey and impact.
Years from now, we hope someone can scroll through these posts and see every campaign we tried, every lesson we learned, every organization we supported, every dollar our community helped raise, every promise we made, and every promise we kept.
We have absolutely no idea where this journey will take us. But that's part of the fun, isn't it?
So follow us on Instagram and Facebook, explore our many other collections, and join us as we keep learning, growing, making noise, and trying to leave this world a little better than we found it.
We may have started with $36. But baby, we're just getting warmed up.