2024 Year in Review and a Look Ahead
We look back on our 2024 and tell you what is on our mind for 2025!
As A Great Idea ends the year on the cusp of our 10th anniversary, we have had many causes to celebrate! We’d love to share some of our highlights from the past twelve months and share what has us excited for 2025!
Some Humble Braggery
We continued to live our values by amplifying and supporting the success of the following events through sponsorship:
- The National LGBTQ Task Force’s Creating Change Conference, the nation’s foremost gathering of activists and organizers who share knowledge and build skills to advance the LGBTQ movement
- GSO Pride, to help promote well-being through events, inclusive spaces, and resources for LGBTQ+ individuals in Greensboro
- LGBTQ Center of Durham’s Queer Health Fairs, which provide access to health services for LGBTQ+ in Durham and adjacent areas
- Soil & Sky, a multi-day festival of music and mutual care in Saxaphaw, NC focused on mental wellness, respect for our environment, and community connections
We launched the Freedom for Every Body campaign to show citizens how the right to do what we want with our bodies interconnects us to reproductive justice, trans rights, and queer liberation. And more recently, we initiated the Power Beyond Pride survey to assess the state of, the needs, and direction of LGBTQ+ movement organizers and activists.
This past May at SYNCHronicity, a national conference connecting healthcare and public health stakeholders to address HIV, HCV, STIs, LGBTQ health, harm reduction, and health equity, we presented two white papers—”More! More? More!?! Skills to Prevent Mission Drift” and “Redefining Communication: Tips to Integrate Harm Reduction Approaches into Nonprofit Messaging”—to assist in building organizational and marketing skills for participants and made them available as free resources all on our site.
And as Hurricane Helene left Western North Carolina in disarray, we were thankful to be able to support our partners as they mobilized assistance to those affected.
Within our own house, so to speak, we have embarked on much self-reflection to better articulate who we are, where we want to go, and what we want to do, particularly as a second Trump administration takes power. We have unveiled new brand values to shape our approach to the work we do. We see these values not as destinations that we arrive to, but as part of the process to give meaning, to empower, and to affirm each other as we strive to make a positive impact in our world.
To that end, we leveled up our own capacity by welcoming our new digital project coordinator, Yara-Nee Dennis, to our full-time team! Yara-Nee has been instrumental in keeping our digital projects on track and helping manage our developers to deliver our award-winning projects.
Speaking of awards, we continued our streak of recognitions this year, including new honors from The Anthem Awards for our collaboration with Be Possible’s “Re-imagining Race and Social Justice” program for Seattle Public Utilities, as well as a Gold MarCom Award for our second issue of We Are Pharma! Advancing Equity magazine for WOCIP (Women of Color in Pharma) and an Honorable Mention for our new website for New Politics.
Check out our full list of honors for this year here.
Forward Together with Joy and Excitement!
While the late poet and essayist Audre Lorde deftly spoke of the “uses of anger” to respond to racism, we at AGI are practicing “joy as resistance,” the perhaps more difficult endeavor, but one we are similarly convinced is essential to our work. Hear from our team on what has us excited and motivated for 2025:
Daniel, Studio Coordinator:
Jade, Communications Team:
Yara-Nee, Digital Project Coordinator:
Euticus, Communications Team:
Shane, Advocate Expert/Owner/Founder:
As we tread toward truly uncertain times in 2025, we will continue to identify our silver linings and celebrate our wins just as we deepen our connections with our partners so that our combined efforts can continue to make a difference like our lives depend on it—because they do.
