Yes It’s True, The Lesbian Conference Is Cancelled, Sadly!

The Lesbian Conference, LLC launched last year with the goal of bringing smart and inspirational conferences to queer and lesbian women with the first event planned for June 21, 2014. The venue was selected, a robust agenda of exciting and exhilarating speakers from the lesbian community was programmed and we were focused on building a community and marketing the event. Just a little more than a month prior, it was decided that poor tickets sales would not allow us to commit to all the financial requirements for the event.

We always learn a lot by trying to do something new and first-time events need a lot of early support as well as some key sponsors. And events that do not serve alcohol or have huge attendance numbers are hard to get sponsor dollars to help make them successful. We knew this would be a challenge.

We did get far but we did not get all the way. And as Theodore Roosevelt once said, “It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed”.

This Lesbian Conference project was my vision and the type of event that I long to attend. I was fortunate to attend Lesbians Who Tech in February and it was just simply exciting to be surrounded by hundreds of lesbians who wanted to connect, share and build a stronger community. And these events cost money and we need support from the community to make them successful and enhance our lives.

Simply stated, The Lesbian Conference is a TEDx type of event for our community. Lesbian business owners were going to talk about how actions create change, an actor was going to share about living out in all your dreams, entrepreneurs were going to share about their movements helping others and there was going to be a lot of interesting dialogue and the opportunity to learn, network, laugh and maybe even cry together.

We will continue to gather data and look for a way to bring this type of spoken word event to you. In the meantime, do share your thoughts and comments and yes, we could have spent a lot more money on marketing and made the tickets free, but this is a company with the idea of making money to enable us to have numerous events around the US and then internationally. It’s reasonable to expect that when thousands of women attend a night in Key West, Miami, Palm Springs, London and elsewhere and pay $100 to enter an event and have a few drinks, that people can justify $79 for an entire day of stimulating talk.

Continue to follow The Lesbian Conference and to share your thoughts, comments and ideas directly at info@thelesbianconference.com

Have a great weekend,

Sandra Sick

Executive Director