Kent’s fifth annual Rainbow Weekend is coming back Oct. 17 and 18 with many familiar events and promotions, but one major change will affect the weekend’s donations.
Created by Kent State faculty and Main Street Kent, the first Rainbow Weekend was held in March 2020. It included many of the same events being hosted this year, such as drag shows, workshops and a bar crawl.
The weekend was considered a major success, and won a 2020 Heritage Ohio award for Best Main Street Committee Event. To better include Kent State students, Main Street Kent moved the weekend to October, which is also LGBTQ+ History Month.
Donations from the weekend went to Kent State’s LGBTQ+ Center’s emergency fund for student crisis and support.
For four years, that’s where donations had been going, until the center closed in June to comply with SB1 regulations.
In response, the Portage Foundation has stepped up with a new fund.
“There’s kind of two buckets, one for grants programming – so for any non-profit serving the community, they would be eligible for grants,” said Janice Simmons-Mortimer, executive director of the Portage Foundation. “And then we have the student emergency crisis grants, very similar to what the LGBTQ Center was doing on Kent State’s campus.”
One major difference between the center’s fund and the foundation’s fund is eligibility. Kent State’s LGBTQ+ Center only offered support to Kent State students, but Portage’s fund is available to any college student in Portage County, Simmons-Mortimer said.
The fund helps cover food insecurity, housing troubles or other basic needs. The hope is to get at least $10,000 into the fund, she said.
“I know that last year, Kent State had over $45,000 go out to crisis in one year,” she said. “So we need to have money there, in order to not run out as fast as we possibly could. We know students are in crisis, so we’re actively trying to promote the fund.”
Another piece in Kent’s Rainbow Weekend’s history is opposition. Most businesses downtown are promoting the weekend with special deals and items, but the weekend has seen vandalism in the past.
In 2022, pride flag banners hanging on the Main Street bridge for the event had been vandalized. Earlier that week, three pride flags had been stolen from Acorn Alley.
Kent police never found the perpetrators.
This isn’t new to Ohio, which has 100 reported hate crimes since June 2022, according to GLAAD, a non-profit LGBTQ+ advocacy organization.
However, LGBTQ+ communities have been gaining a more positive outlook. GLAAD’s data shows 2025 has seen a 20% decrease in the number of incidents compared to 2023-2024.
Nicole Joseph, an organizer of the weekend’s LGBTQ+ market and bar crawl and manager at Sun In Leo, a clothing store in Acorn Alley, said she’s never had direct opposition to her public pro-LGBTQ+ stance, but does encounter online anger.
“We have been running Instagram and Facebook ads for the events and stuff,” said Joseph, who is also a co-founder of Kent Pride. “… There’s people in Columbus or people in Cleveland that comment really mean messages on [the posts].”
Joseph hopes anti-LGBTQ views stay away from Kent.
“Because we’re Kent based, I don’t think there will be [hate],” Joseph said. “… I guess if we do get some, we’ll go with it with grace and kindness, and either ignore them or educate them with what we’re doing.”
The Portage Foundation isn’t showing bias to one group or the other, Simmons-Mortimer said. They’re responding to the needs of the community, and right now, this is what the community needs.
Aryn Kauble is a reporter. Contact him at [email protected].
