2025 COVID Statement

Dear Seattle Dykes,

We at the Seattle Dyke Alliance recognize that many of our events this past year have not been as COVID safe as they could be, and that this makes them inaccessible for many members of our community. We sincerely apologize to any members of our community who have been left out of our programming, particularly at last year’s march. We recognize that outsourcing our masked section organization resulted in insufficient safety practices for several community members and organizers alike, and will continue to discuss improvements both for the next march and our other events at our open attendance town hall meetings. Our incoming leadership team is also taking several steps going forward to make our events safer and more accessible to all Dykes, not just those who can risk entering a space where masking is not enforced.

Many of our events are hosted in collaboration with local businesses. While we greatly value these community partnerships, we believe it would be unsafe and unethical to promote our events as fully masked when we do not have the capacity to enforce this for the entire space we are in. As a result, we are in the process of finding spaces to host mask-required versions of our events such as craft night and speed dating. We also have online events such as writers groups and monthly movie nights available through our discord server, which will continue.

We are in the process of building up our accessibility committee, who will help to coordinate resources such as higher quality masks for our events than those that we have been providing. It is our hope that this group will be able to collaborate with our media manager and our board president to ensure that accurate accessibility information about each of our events is available. This group will also help to ensure that our existing Dyke March resources such as interpreters remain available while implementing more structured mask-enforced areas as well.

Thank you to all the members of our community and our incoming board who have stepped up to share their experiences and connect us to resources. In order to implement these accessibility measures or anything else sustainably, we rely on volunteer involvement, so please reach out to our email (listed below) to get involved. We would love to get your input. As an entirely volunteer run organization we could not exist, grow and improve, or support the Dyke community without you – thank you for your ongoing support! We look forward to improving on past practices and creating more inclusive spaces for all Dykes in 2025.

Yours,
The Seattle Dyke Alliance Organizers
organizers@seattledykemarch.com