New Castle woman rides with pride for Facebook fundraiser

With almost every major LGBTQ Pride Month event being canceled due to COVID-19, Salina Brett, a transgender woman and board secretary for the Equality Alliance of Chester County, says she wanted to show her support for the community in another way.

The Facebook fundraiser 2020 Pride Bike DE was thus created. Brett aims to ride her bicycle 25 miles each Saturday of June, for a total of 100 miles for the month. Each week she supports a different cause that she says touches the heart of the LGBTQ movement. In her Facebook posts, she asks for donations and also urges her friends to share her posts so she can reach a wider audience.

Brett has raised $2,885 with three rides so far. She has supported the Black Lives Matter movement and Planned Parenthood. This past Saturday she rode from Rehoboth to Bethany and back to Rehoboth in support of the Trevor Project, an organization that works as a free, confidential suicide hotline for LGBTQ youth. 

“We as a community have to look out for them,” Brett said about LGBTQ youth, adding that they tend to have high rates of suicide attempts and mental health issues.

Brett says she started the fundraiser because she wanted to do something that promotes the LGBTQ community as more than a group of people who are non-mainstream in gender and sexuality. Instead, she wanted to show they are a community with a passionate love for both humanity and the planet, she said.

Saturday, June 27, she will ride through Dover for the Environmental Defense Fund, in support of saving the planet.

Brett is also urging the LGBTQ community to take on more leadership roles, and for people to remember, “Our love leads. Our love wins.”