DG PrideFest returns to Fishel Park in Downers Grove
For the second year in a row, the DG PrideFest, a community event aimed at bringing the community together, will be held at Fishel Park in Downers Grove.
With the theme “You Belong,” this year’s festival will run from noon to 3 p.m. Saturday, June 7, at the park. Equality Downers Grove (EQDG) and other local organizations sponsor the event.
The festival will have a food truck, music, children’s activities, and several community organizations, including health/wellbeing providers, counseling groups, the DuPage County Health Department, and the League of Women Voters.
Enrique Reyes, Equality Downers Grove co-chair, said the organizations will have interactive activities to help engage attendees with partner organizations, he added.
“We had 400 people come last year, and we are hoping to beat that number,” Reyes said.
Events like PrideFest are important to show support from the community, Reyes said.
“It really helps show the broader community that there is our cause and our organization,” he said.
“We work a lot with Youth Outlook, an Illinois-based social service agency dedicated (to) supporting LGBTQ+ youth,” Reyes said. “Our work allows that center to stay open.”
Youth Outlook has a drop-in center in Downers Grove.
This year’s PrideFest received a wide range of community support, including from the Downers Grove Park District and the Downers Grove Junior Woman’s Club, which is sponsoring this year’s official PrideFest 2025 T-shirt.
Equality Downers Grove began in 2017 and became a full-fledged nonprofit in 2022. The organization has been steadily growing for the last several years.
“We had a few LGBTQ Pride picnics at Fishel Park,” Kathryn Deiss, EQDG co-chair, said of the event’s early days.
About four years ago, “We began to add more Pride events and began collaborations with the Downers Grove Public Library and the Downers Grove First United Methodist Church,” she said.
In 2024, EQDG launched its first official PrideFest in Downers Grove. “This year, we are doing much the same, but bigger,” Deiss said.