Embracing Our Differences

Happy Pride Month! 🌈

Here are a few simple ways to celebrate with kindness, inclusion, and respect:
✨Use people's correct names and pronouns
✨Listen with curiosity, not assumptions
✨Amplify LGBTQ+ voices, art, and businesses
✨Speak up when something isn't right
✨Check in on the LGBTQ+ people in your life
✨Show up all year long

Pride is for everyone. Let's make it feel that way. 🏳️‍🌈

“Change the Game”
By Davide Nolfo
Torino, Italy
2025 Gallery

Some of the most important conversations start with a painting, a photograph, a sketch, or something we hear that makes us stop and think.

Embracing Our Differences looks for art like these pieces that explore the perspectives that shape our everyday lives. The roles we're handed, the boxes we're put in, the expectations we have to push back against.

They exist in our daily lives, and art is how we work through them together.

Title: “The New Rosie the Riveter”
Artist: Elisa U.
8th Grade, Sarasota Military Academy Prep, Sarasota, Florida
Teacher: Pam Kok
2018 Gallery

Title: “Pink is for Girls”
Artist: Napoleon Stewart
Edwardsville, Kansas
2020 Gallery

Title: “Whose Doll?”
Artist: Courtney Beth Tippett
Bradenton, Florida
2023 Gallery

🎓 Students & adults
🎨 Amateur & professional creatives

If you have a piece that inspires empathy, dialogue, and understanding, we want to hear from you.

👉$12,000 in total cash awards
👉No submission fee
📅 Deadline: July 1, 2026

🔗 Submit artwork & quotations:
https://www.embracingourdifferences.org/submit-art-quote/

The wrong words can echo for a lifetime. What we say, and how we say it, shapes the world around us more than we realize.

Choose your words like they matter, because they always do. 💬

"This art depicts the diversity of people found in San Francisco and can represent the diversity of other cities — the lonely gay man, the hardworking woman, the carefree child, the shriveled homeless one.”
- Marconi Calindas
San Francisco, California
“Angels of San Francisco”
2014 Gallery

Each figure is a reminder that every life holds weight, and every story deserves to be met with kindness.

Congratulations to 2025–2026 EOD Scholarship Recipient Abigail Lauber! 🌟

Abigail, a Riverview High School student and four-year member of Coexistence Club, will attend the University of South Florida to study Psychology.

We cannot wait to see the positive impact she will make in the years ahead. Help us congratulate Abigail on this exciting achievement!

See you at Silver Pride! 🏳️‍🌈

Presented by Senior Friendship Centers & Project Pride SRQ, this FREE celebration honors the amazing LGBTQ+ community members who are 50 and better.

It's going to be a fun day and we are so happy to be a part of it! Come stop by and say hello.

We can't wait to see you there!
https://www.ppsrq.org/silverpride2026

In honor of , we’re sharing a few prompts inspired by kindness, inclusion, and the beauty of different perspectives. ✨

Whether you’re an artist, writer, or simply someone with a story to tell, we hope these inspire you to create something meaningful.

Which prompt did you choose?