Dear Pride Trustees,
We met last week to discuss my potentially joining Pride in Brighton & Hove as a Trustee and Director. In that meeting, I was really encouraged by our talk about transparency and engaging with stakeholders, including through public consultation.

However, over the last week I have been truly dismayed to see the way in which the trustees appear to have dealt with the LGBT community and with the key businesses that support Pride in Brighton & Hove.

Following your recent strategy day, you published your proposals for 2010. While many of the proposals you made were prudent in the light of your current financial crisis, what beggars belief is that you seem to have published them without having first gone back to those who enable you to put on the event each year.

Your much mooted consultation materialised in the form of what appears to be a heavily weighted online survey on your website – where are the public forums, stakeholder discussions and canvassing of real feedback that any meaningful consultation would include?

I applied to join the trustee board because I feel passionately that Pride should stand at the heart of Brighton’s LGBT community, contributing to LGBT visibility and supporting the community.

From what I have seen over the past week, I have no confidence that the current trustee board are capable of delivering this or of delivering a sustainable, viable event.

I am therefore withdrawing my application to the board although, for the sake of the LGBT community in Brighton and Hove, hope that you prove me wrong.

I am copying Gscene magazine into this letter to ensure at least some transparency with regard to Pride at the moment as there seems a worrying lack of transparancy generally which seems bewildering for a community organisation and I'm very keen to encourage Pride to start being more open and engage with the community in a meaningful way.

Yours sincerely,
Kian de Loach