Stonewall: The night before
Your organization wants to honor your LGBTQ+ employees this June.
But every option feels like a landmine.
Too bold and you risk internal conflict. Too safe and you've insulted the very people you're trying to celebrate. So most organizations do something small, something that technically counts, and hope nobody notices.
There's another way.
1969
Greenwich Village, New York City
"How does a community survive
without losing who they are?"
Most Pride programming asks people to take a position. The sessions that actually change teams are the ones where everyone finds themselves in the story. Shared experience creates understanding that explanation alone can't.
The Experience - 60 minutes. No lectures. Everyone in the story.
01 Enter the Room
Your team is transported to the summer of 1969, inside the Stonewall Inn, the night before everything changed. A professional game master sets the scene, introduces the inciting incident, and keeps the stakes rising throughout.
02 Take Your Place
Participants inhabit historical figures, real people most have never encountered, each representing a different answer to the same impossible question: assimilation, visibility, protecting resources, or unity above all else. Nobody takes a side. Everyone finds themselves in the story.
03 Negotiate, Debate, Decide
Factions argue, negotiate, and ultimately must agree on a unified stance. The tension is real. The stakes are historical. And the conversation that emerges is unlike anything your team has had before.
04 Bring It Home
The final ten minutes connect 1969 directly to your workplace today. Where do these same tensions live in your organization? What does it cost people to hide? What becomes possible when they don't? This is when the room gets quiet, in the best possible way.
The Details
Format:
Virtual or In-person
Duration: 60 Minutes (90-minute format available for larger groups)
Group Size: 8 to unlimited
Investment: Starting at $1,500
Availability: Three June dates still open
Meet Your Facilitator
Elena Joy Thurston
Elena Joy Thurston is a leadership strategist, keynote speaker, and the founder of Latitude Leaders, a leadership development company whose clients include Logitech, Peloton, and the Denver Broncos, with features in Forbes, ABC, and HuffPost.
She is also a queer woman who came out publicly in her 2019 TEDx talk and who has spent the years since building leadership experiences that make it safer for people to show up as exactly who they are.
Stonewall: The Night Before was born at a Pride festival booth. Elena Joy realized that the queer people around her — out, proud, and present — didn't know the history of the uprising that made their visibility possible. So she researched. And what she found felt too important to keep to herself.
Elena Joy brings to this experience the same thing she brings to every room she facilitates: the ability to hold tension without resolving it too quickly, to create safety without removing the stakes, and to leave people changed in ways they didn't see coming.
This is Pride programming
that doesn't ask anyone
to choose a side.
It asks everyone to find themselves in the story.
⬤ Three June dates still available.