BOLTON Pride begins on Friday and in the build-up, The Bolton News is running a series of special features as part of its comprehensive coverage of the event.

Today, NEIL BRANDWOOD looks at the organisation that goes into Pride and speaks with events director Liz Pycroft about the importance of educating more people about LGBT issues.

WHY is a heterosexual mother-of-one the events director of Bolton Pride?

Surprisingly, there are still some people who just don’t understand why Liz Pycroft is involved.

“It’s simple,” explains Liz. “I don’t like bullies.”

“You don’t have to be gay to be supportive of an LGBT community. It doesn’t just come down to the gay element, or the lesbian element or the transgender element.

“For me, it’s about bullying and, at the end of the day, it’s hate crime.”

Liz has been involved with Bolton Pride since its inception four years ago and, along with founder James Edgington and creative director, James Marshall, she is one of the three core members of the project.

“I’ve been friends with James Edgington all my life. We’ve grown up together, we’ve seen the problems that can arise from being a gay man growing up in Bolton.

“I’ve witnessed it when I’ve been out on the scene with him and other gay friends. I’ve seen the sneering looks they get, I’ve heard the verbal taunts that people give.

“I have always been strongly against bullying, I don’t like it when anyone is unkind to anybody, so I’ve always been passionate about it.

“Getting involved with Bolton Pride allows me to do something about it by helping to educate people.”

And it begins at home for Liz, who is bringing up her 12-year-old son, Lewis, to be understanding and accepting.

“I educate him to be aware of diversity and respect everybody for who they are. Diversity enriches society.”

Lewis also helps give her a valuable insight into the younger generation’s attitude to LGBT issues.

“Recently, I was trying to get a group involved with the educational side of Pride, but they didn’t want the word ‘lesbian’ to be used.

“I mentioned it to Lewis to gauge his response and he looked at me totally puzzled.

“He said: ‘Why can’t you use that word?’. It was good to discover that his generation don’t see anything taboo using the word ‘lesbian’. It’s just a word in the grand scheme of things,”says Liz

The theme of this year’s Bolton Pride is Reflect, Educate, Celebrate, something that Liz was highly instrumental in.

“I pointed out that we needed to think about where we’ve come from with Pride – we need to be celebrating what we’ve done with Pride, with the community.

“The thing that’s still missing is education, and that’s the key thing that I want to get out there.

“We need to educate children, we need to educate the elderly, we need to educate the different communities, we need to educate everybody.

“Before we go into our fifth year we need to reflect on where we’ve been. Reflection is really important, as is celebration, as is education, so I think it’s a really good theme for this year.”

Planning each Bolton Pride is a year-round job, and it says a lot about Liz’s commitment that she does it while at the same time studying and working for 40 hours each week as a full-time student mental health nurse at university.

“Throughout the year, we’re planning and discussing things we want to adapt and change, and how we can use the support we’ve got to take Pride forward.

“We’ve already got plans in motion and ideas for what we want to do next year.

“We’re always on it, and we need to be because all three of us have got full-time jobs and Pride is not something you can just throw together at the last minute, it’s something that needs to be ongoing.”

Liz says she has seen Bolton Pride develop massively in its short existence.

“Originally we wanted to keep it really small. We had to remember that we were a small team and had limited time. We needed to make sure that we were getting the important messages across in the right way.

“We didn’t want to get carried away with grandiose ideas that we couldn’t deliver. We didn’t want to run before we could walk and we certainly didn’t want to fail before we could succeed.”

She adds: “By starting off small at the beginning we set achievable goals and that’s the the way we’ve done it all the way through.

“It’s still quite daunting sometimes and I worry that we’ve got a bit too big. But then I’ve looked at it and realised we’ve done really well here, we’ve helped educate people.”

This year’s Bolton Pride is the biggest yet, with more sponsors than ever before, 500 people already entered for the parade on Saturday, and more than 50 stalls and stands lined-up for Victoria Square and Market Place.

In the process of helping to organise it, Liz says that she has seen herself develop, take on new challenges and learn more about herself. Like thousands of others, she is now counting down the days until Friday’s launch.

“Now that everything is in place, the apprehension has disappeared and I’m feeling very proud and excited,” she said. “It’s something that I love to do and I never want to stop being a part of it.”