Spotlight on Cairngorms Pride CIC
This Pride Month, we’re celebrating our members who are working to improve the lives and rights of the LGBTQIA+ community in Scotland and beyond. In our newest member spotlight, we’re happy to be joined by Kath Pierce (she/her), Co-Founder, Co-Director of Cairngorms Pride CIC.
What does your social enterprise do?
Our tagline is ‘Here for the planet. Queer for the planet.’ because our brand-new social enterprise exists at the intersection of environmental and LGBTQ+ social justice. Based in the Cairngorms National Park, we are the UK’s largest Pride (in land area), and one which is 50% nature led, as half the Park’s 4528 km2 area is classed as ‘wild land’. We want to help shape a new queer climate movement with the creation of our new eco-Pride supporting both LGBTQ+ people and the planet to thrive.
How do you do it?
We are a newly launched networked enterprise with strategic partnerships to help us deliver real and tangible environmental and social change through local community development projects and initiatives. Our work is focused on community building, through our five organisational elements: LGBTQ Pride Community Building and Wellbeing, Environmental Education, Climate Action, Nature Restoration, Research and Learning.
Why should someone buy/use your product/services? What are the benefits and what makes your organisation unique?
As far as we know, we are the first eco-Pride organisation to exist in Scotland, and perhaps even the UK. We are such a young business (we founded last year and received start-up funding at the beginning of 2025) and we are enjoying forming and shaping our organisational philosophy, business model, outputs and impacts. Our projects are designed to bring visibility to LGBTQ+ communities in and around the Cairngorms National Park, so that queer people and their allies and friends can find each other and connect. Our planet-focused projects are also designed to be ways for people to experience kindness and positivity, in a world which is becoming increasingly hateful towards LGBTQ+ people.
What is your personal motivation?
The Cairngorms National Park is breathtakingly beautiful place to live, and its nature and biodiversity support my health and wellbeing every single day. Importantly, queerness exists in the natural world in at least 1500 species (they are discovering more all the time), and yet it seems nature itself has no queer advocate, which is where we hope to come in. The relationship LGBTQ+ people have in a rural space like ours is hugely influenced by their experiences of acceptance and belonging in nature. I want to thank the natural environment for how it helps me, and we as an organisation want to collectively use the focus of healing the planet as a way to find, connect and bond our own human LGBTQ+ and ally communities together, to feel hopeful and optimistic in a tough and hostile world. Another vital part of queer culture is a sense of humour, and we are certainly making sure that we build queer joy into everything we do and hope to do.
What is the current focus for your social enterprise?
We are such a young enterprise, and we are in the forming stages of building our strategic partnerships and delivering our first projects. We are launching our Diversity in Nature project in partnership with the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (RZSS) which begins with our Art Prize with the theme of “Queerness and Nature”. We also have our new Cairngorms Pride Village project called “Pollination Street”, in partnership with Crown Estate Scotland, which will involving bee/bug residence building and its very own new queer Instagram drama (think Queer Eye for the Dragonfly meets Beastenders). Lastly and most importantly, we have our Cairngorms Pride Social Spaces Network project where Park venues are offering up their spaces so that our LGBTQ+ and ally groups can meet regularly. This means queer visibility is improved and all sorts of different activities can happen across the Park – from sports to crafting to book groups and ceilidhs – the big Cairngorms sky is the limit.
What exciting things do you have coming up?
All of the above! We can’t wait to get our LGBTQ+ communities together to design our beautiful new Cairngorms Pride Village, and we’re very excited about all the very different spaces who want to help us to help LGBTQ+ and ally people to meet, thrive and do their bit to look after our beautiful part of the planet. We are hopeful of broad financial and in-kind support from Park businesses, benefactors and sponsors, and from a wider ecosystem of queer and environmental communities of interest who want to support us. We are working on those mechanisms of support (donations, possible memberships, merchandise etc) at the moment.
Who do you want to work with more?
We will have a very local focus – i.e. within the Park – but that’s over 4500 square kilometres, so that will keep us busy! We are very keen to link with more ecology and environmental organisations whose input will help to shape our philosophy going forward. We might look to host our own queer climate Pride festival (with a March and fair), which may be next year, but we need to get started first and to see if everything goes to plan. Most of all, we want people to talk to us about how they want to be part of what we are doing.
What’s your biggest challenge?
The gift of having been granted start-up funding means we are against a ticking clock – we have less than 12 months to ensure we have secured project and trading income to ensure that our vision and mission can be fulfilled, and we can become a permanent fixture in Park life. It is going to be tough, but we are confident we have the right team and an incredible amount of support from local residents in and around the Park. The original Pride consultation, which was carried out last year, involved 400 participants, of whom 81% were very much in favour of there being a Pride in the Cairngorms National Park. 100 of these voices were from young people, so there are lots of communities counting on us!
Where do you see your organisation in 5 years?
Hopefully still here for the planet and very much still queer for the planet! We hope that our LGBTQ+ human and non-human communities are thriving and our projects have bedded in well and are an intrinsic and visibly queer part of life in the Cairngorms National Park.
What top tips would you give to other social enterprises?
The three things that matter more than anything else are remaining true to your core purpose and being authentically yourself in your work, all while looking for innovative ways to monetise your offering in a way which doesn’t support capitalism and resource depletion. Over reliance on funding is unwise, albeit inevitable in the early years. You might have to have a few irons in the fire to support yourself financially.
For more information about Cairngorms Pride CIC, please visit their website and make sure to follow them on Instagram and LinkedIn.
Want to read more Member Spotlights? Visit our blog. If you’d like to be featured, please email membership@socialenterprise.scot.