Summary
Organization name
Badge Of Pride
Tax id (EIN)
88-4258497
Causes
LGBTQIA
Operating Budget
Less than $100,000
Counties Served
Collin, Dallas, Denton, Tarrant
Address
300 S. Montreal AveDallas, TX 75208
About
Our Work
Badge Of Pride makes LGBTQ+ history visible, accessible, and useful. In four years, a grassroots idea has grown into a nationally recognized cultural organization with deep roots in North Texas and an impact that reaches far beyond. Through exhibitions, public programs, oral histories, and community archiving, we activate a collection of more than 10,000 artifacts and connect thousands of people with the stories, struggles, creativity, and cultural inheritance that shape LGBTQ+ life.
Our landmark exhibition, Badge Of Pride: From Silence to Celebration!, was the largest artifact-centered LGBTQ+ history exhibition ever presented in Texas. With free admission, gender-inclusive Spanish translation, and support from community partners, it welcomed more than 3,000 visitors to the Irving Archives & Museum. The exhibition showed what becomes possible when LGBTQ+ history is given serious public space: people found context, connection, and a stronger sense of belonging to something larger than their own lifetimes.
Our Work, Recognized
- American Alliance of Museums, Museum Impact Award, 2026
- American Association for State and Local History, Award of Excellence, Leadership in History Awards, 2026
- National Council on Public History, Outstanding Public History Project Award (Small Institution), 2026
- Academy of Interactive & Visual Arts, 32nd Annual Communicator Awards, Award of Excellence, 2026
- International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences, Anthem Awards, Silver, 2025
- Texas Association of Museums, Mitchell A. Wilder Publication Design Award, Gold, 2026
Why This Work Matters Now
Across Texas and around the country, LGBTQ+ history is being removed from classrooms, challenged in libraries, and pushed out of public life. These decisions shape what people are allowed to learn about themselves, their communities, and the country they live in. Badge Of Pride responds by presenting honest, well-researched LGBTQ+ history to the public..
Your gift helps us preserve irreplaceable artifacts, document firsthand experiences, and bring exhibitions and programs to communities across Texas and beyond. It supports public access, education, and cultural understanding at a time when all three are being deliberately restricted.
Memory Into Momentum
Preservation is not the endpoint of our work. We use what we preserve to create exhibitions, public programs, oral histories, and performances that help people understand the present. From Deep in the Heart, our statewide oral history project, to CORRESPONDENCE: Letters of Queer Resistance, Love & Revolution, we work with artists, writers, historians, elders, and young people to bring historical knowledge into contemporary public life.
Our work draws on art, activism, and rigorous historical research. It creates opportunities for people to encounter unfamiliar experiences, examine difficult questions, and see the present with greater context.
Reflecting the Breadth of LGBTQ+ Experience
Badge Of Pride works to reflect LGBTQ+ life across race, gender identity, disability, class, age, and geography. We give particular attention to Black, Brown, Indigenous, trans, nonbinary, disabled, immigrant, and rural Queer Texans whose experiences have too often received little attention from cultural institutions.
Equity shapes what we preserve, whose expertise we seek, how we interpret history, and who can access our work.
Your investment gives LGBTQ+ history a public future. It protects what has survived, supports new scholarship and creative work, and helps future generations understand the lives, ideas, and movements that shaped the world they inherited.
Mission
Badge Of Pride collects and activates artifacts from LGBTQ+ history to inform, enrich and engage the power of the contemporary Queer experience.
Needs
At Badge Of Pride, we are building one of the most ambitious LGBTQ+ public-history efforts in Texas. Your partnership keeps Queer stories visible, protected, and part of the cultural life of our communities.
Your support powers the next phase of Badge Of Pride’s work: taking "From Silence…To Celebration!" on the road to communities across Texas and the South where Queer history is often inaccessible; expanding community programs like Say It Loud, CORRESPONDENCE, and our art-activism workshops; and advancing "Deep in the Heart," our statewide rural oral-history project documenting LGBTQ+ lives at risk of disappearing without action now.
You also help safeguard our growing archive of 10,000+ artifacts through digitization, preservation, research, and public access—ensuring these stories remain protected, interpreted, and woven into the cultural life of our communities. Your investment carries LGBTQ+ history forward and makes it reachable where it’s needed most.
Equity Statement
Badge Of Pride is built on the understanding that the Queer community has never been one story. It is many histories, many identities, many lived realities—shaped by race, gender identity, sexuality, disability, class, age, immigration, geography, and experience. These intersections are not peripheral to our work; they are the foundation of it.
We acknowledge that the historical record has been shaped by systems that decide who is seen and who is pushed to the margins. Racism, transphobia, misogyny, ableism, xenophobia, and class inequity have influenced what is preserved, what is dismissed, and whose lives are treated as worthy of memory. These forces have harmed not only society at large but the LGBTQ+ community itself.
Our commitment is to confront those inequities directly. We ground our work in accountability, transparency, and a practice of community-centered decision-making. We prioritize the voices and leadership of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color; trans and nonbinary communities; disabled Queer people; immigrants; and those whose histories have been systematically denied space.
Through exhibitions, oral histories, public programs, and partnerships, we aim to reshape who carries authority in historical storytelling. We work to expand access, bridge generational and cultural divides, and ensure that the historical record reflects the full breadth of LGBTQ+ life.
Equity is not a statement for us—it is the process, the practice, and the path. And it guides every artifact we preserve, every story we uplift, and every community we serve.
Media gallery
Organization Data
Dallas, TX 75208