Victorian Pride Centre asks donors to fund the drive to regional Victoria

The St Kilda hub is raising money to show up at Bendigo Pride, ChillOut and Gippsland Pride with a stall, resources and a friendly face.

Told by Claire Lawson · 30 September 2026

The Victorian Pride Centre is asking for money to go regional, which sounds like a nice idea until you remember how many queer Victorians live hours from St Kilda and have never walked through those doors.

The Centre is raising funds through GiveOUT Day — Australia's annual day of giving for LGBTQIA+ communities, created to address the chronic underfunding of the sector — to take stalls to regional Pride events including Bendigo Pride, ChillOut Daylesford and Gippsland Pride. Donations cover travel, stall hire, signage, printed resources and volunteer support so the Centre's team can show up, share what the Pride Centre offers, and connect regional community members with services, events and each other.

The pitch is straightforward: for LGBTQ+ people living outside Melbourne, connection to services, community and support can be harder to find. A friendly face and a table full of resources at a local Pride event can make all the difference.

It is also a pitch that should not need to be made in 2026. The Victorian Pride Centre opened in St Kilda in 2021 as a state hub — not a Melbourne hub — and regional Victorians have been asking ever since how a building on Fitzroy Street is supposed to serve someone in Ballarat, Bendigo or Gippsland who cannot afford the petrol to get there, let alone the time off work.

The answer, apparently, is a fundraising campaign.

GiveOUT Day is run by Rainbow Giving Australia, a national LGBTQIA+ community foundation that also administers the Amplify Pride and Ignite Pride grant programmes. The Centre is one of many organisations fundraising through the day, which is designed to address what Rainbow Giving calls the chronic underfunding of the rainbow community sector. The Centre says every regional Pride event it attends means more people across Victoria know there is a place that welcomes, values and celebrates them, no matter their postcode.

That is true. It is also true that the gap between St Kilda and regional Victoria is not a surprise, it is not new, and it is not something donors should have to fix on an annual giving day because the state did not fund the Centre to do the work its name promised.

The person who drives two hours to ChillOut, sees the stall, picks up a card and finally knows where to call — that person should not be grateful. They should have been told years ago.