Reflections on Pride Month at Solarport

Reflections on Pride Month at Solarport

As June draws to a close and the rainbow flags start coming down from LinkedIn profiles, we’ve been reflecting on something we noticed this year: there seemed to be fewer of them going up in the first place. Across the corporate world, banners that once changed without fail at the start of the month stayed as they were. Maybe companies are worried about looking performative, maybe the climate has made solidarity feel commercially risky, or maybe it’s something else. We don’t know. What we do know is what we decided at Solarport, which is that this year, of all years, the flag mattered more, not less.

We flew it as a sign of solidarity, but we wanted to make sure there was substance behind ours. We’re passionate about this, and in a year when rights that took decades to win are being questioned, narrowed and in some places removed altogether, visibility felt like the start of our contribution rather than the whole of it.

It’s tempting to believe that progress only moves in one direction, but the truth is more uncomfortable than that. Within the working lifetime of people in our own business, it was lawful in this country to dismiss someone from their job simply for being gay. The freedoms many of us never have to think about were fought for by people who had no choice but to think about them every day, and they are kept by people who refuse to take them for granted.

Nothing brought that home more than the lunch and learn held this month, where one of our colleagues shared their story of building a long career while the world around them slowly changed. The room was packed, colleagues wanted to give up their lunch hour to listen, and what followed was deeply profound. We won’t summarise it here, because some stories deserve to be heard rather than paraphrased but it was clear from the faces in the room that many of us simply hadn’t known what had gone before, the laws, the silences, the daily calculations that shaped working life for gay men and women within living memory. People are still talking about it around the office, and that, to us, is what a flag with something behind it looks like.

We’re proud of the culture we’ve built at Solarport, one where people of every background, identity and belief work side by side and where, we hope, every one of us can be entirely ourselves without having to weigh up whether it’s safe to do so. That culture didn’t happen by accident, it’s the product of the people who work here and how we choose to treat one another, and like anything worth having, it needs looking after.

For us, the real measure of an inclusive workplace is whether everyone here can be themselves in the middle of January, in meetings, in passing conversations about their weekend, without a second thought. That’s the standard we all, alongside our DEI committee, will keep holding us to all year round.

The flags may be coming down, but ours went up, and the conversation it stood for carries on.