A partnership proposal · She & HER
Let us build the room for the sapphics.
Chris — Desirée Mayon, founder of She & HER.
Your theme is Louder & Prouder. We'd like to bring a room where sapphic women get to be neither for an hour — two days in Piedmont Park, anchored by Erica Mason, who lives here.
We produce it. We staff it. We fund it. We need somewhere to put it.
The room
Where does a sapphic woman go at a festival when she needs ten minutes? Not to leave — just to stop performing for a while.
That question is the Powder Room. We built the first one at NYC Pride in June. It ran all day.
Click through the plan.
The mirror wall
Good light and real mirrors — the thing every festival forgets. Somewhere to fix your face without queueing for a portaloo.
Refresh & beauty
A stocked station: blotting, setting spray, deodorant, hair ties, lint rollers, plasters, period products. Free, taken not asked for.
Water & electrolytes
Cold water and electrolytes all day. In October in Piedmont Park this is not a nice-to-have.
The community wall
Prompts people actually answer. What does community mean to you. What helped you find your people. It fills up by mid-afternoon and it is the best thing in the room.
Resources, unattended
Mental-health, sexual-health and LGBTQ+ resources on an open table. Free, no sign-up, nobody watching you take one. That last part is the whole design.
Somewhere to sit
Soft seating, low noise, no queue. The only thing being asked of you in here is nothing.
“Every woman knows the feeling of the door closing behind her. The noise drops. The performance drops. Whatever face you were holding for the room out there — you don't need it in here. This is the one place that was never built for the male gaze, and it never asked you to explain yourself.”
The Powder Room · She & HERErica
Erica Mason lives in Atlanta. A Black queer artist — her words: visionary artist, speaker and healer. She has already run one of her Healing Experience events here.
Her album The Return came out in March. Here is how she describes it, beside the line we wrote for the Powder Room months before we met her:
“Whatever face you were holding for the room out there — you don't need it in here.”
The Powder Room · She & HER“It's about what happens when you stop shrinking, start trusting yourself again, and walk boldly in who God always called you to be.”
Erica Mason on The ReturnThe album ships with an eight-track affirmation record and a companion podcast, and extends into her Healing Experience tour. The music is the front door to something bigger — which is why she fits a room, not a stage slot.
She also released a song called Queer Christian. In the South, that is not a small thing to have standing in the middle of your festival.
The day
Built around your marches rather than against them — we'd set the final times off whatever step-off you call.
The stage
You announced JT on 1 July. You added Shea Couleé on 7 August. So we know the bill isn't closed, and we'd like to ask.
We are not pitching the JT slot. JT is in another weight class and we're not going to pretend otherwise — the chart below includes the metric where that's most obvious, because you'd check it anyway.
What we're saying is narrower: on four of five measures Erica sits second on your own bill, and she is the only one of the five who lives in Atlanta.
Spotify and YouTube figures read directly from the platforms, 22 August 2026. Instagram and TikTok are HypeAuditor estimates, same date. Bars are to scale.
She'd play whatever you have room for — Main Stage support, the Community Stage, or nothing at all beyond our own room. Her fee is ours either way.
We are not asking you to build any of this.
The ask
Plainly, so you can forward it to whoever decides. Five things we're bringing and five things we're asking you for. Open any row to see both sides. None of the asks is money.
Built, staffed and stocked across both days — mirrors, a refresh and beauty station, hydration, a community wall, and a photo moment. Plus what we always carry: mental-health, sexual-health and LGBTQ+ resources, free, no sign-up required.
A Marketplace footprint big enough to sit down in. And if you have a say in where — near the 12th Street gate, because that is where the Dyke March comes back in.
Twice inside the Powder Room across the weekend — an acoustic set and a healing conversation. And, if you'll have her, a slot on your lineup. We book her, we pay her, we brief her, and her fee is ours either way.
A place on the bill. Main Stage support or the Community Stage — you know your programme better than we do. And the Powder Room named as ours.
We're not building a float and we're not asking you for an entry. What we'd bring to a partner who already has one is Erica on their deck on Sunday, our brand alongside theirs, and our content crew shooting it — a recognisable artist and a sapphic audience on a float that's rolling anyway.
An introduction. You know which of your partners has room and which of them would want this. Point us at one and we'll do the rest of the conversation ourselves.
Not a crew we'd go and hire — the team that already shoots our activations, on site across both days, capturing the room, the sets and the people in it. Delivered inside two weeks, cleared and yours to use, not just ours. Festival footage you didn't have to budget for.
Name us where you name people. She & HER credited on the Powder Room wherever activations get listed — site, schedule, Marketplace map — tagged when you post the room or Erica, included in the pre-festival announcements, and credited on any of our footage you run. Plus permission to shoot inside our own footprint.
Consent-first measurement on everything we run, produced through The She & HER Research Institute, our 501(c)(3) research arm. Nobody gets counted who didn't opt in. A post-event report inside ten business days — who came, where they came from, what moved, what it was worth — and the same report comes to you as comes to us.
Shared access to what gets built. Three things from your side: a few of our questions in whatever post-festival survey you already run, the aggregate attendance and demographic figures you publish anyway, and the right to use our own findings in our research. We are not asking for your list. No names, no contacts, nothing identifiable about anyone — that's yours and it should stay yours.
The audience it opens
Not a Pride-circuit following — a wellness following. Her own media kit puts it at 25–45-year-old wellness-conscious women and creatives.
Spotify figures are platform-direct; TikTok and Instagram are HypeAuditor estimates, all observed August 2026. We'd rather give you a sourced number than a rounded one.
Women who follow a Black queer artist for what she says about healing, faith and self-worth. Plenty of them in Georgia. Some have never come to a Pride festival — not because they weren't welcome, but because what they see online reads as a party, and a party isn't what they're after.
A calm room is a different door in. For the woman who wants the community without the club. For the woman still working out how her faith and her sexuality share a body.
That's the market. Not invented for a proposal — it exists, it trusts her, and it would now have a reason to spend a Saturday in Piedmont Park.
Somewhere to sit down, at the biggest free Pride in the country.
Your own plan
“Formalize the internal process for initiating programs and partnerships based on the unique needs of Atlanta's diverse LGBTQ+ communities.”
Strategic Plan 2025–2027 · Community ConnectorWe'd like to be the partnership that tests that process. Low risk — we carry the cost. Easy to measure — measuring is the other half of what we do.
Your Festival Resiliency pillar also calls for an attendee data system. Our attribution work is already built. If the room goes well, you end the weekend holding a working version of it, on our budget, with nothing to maintain.
And if you'd rather we ran a good room and left the data out of it, we'll do that too. It's your festival.
Why us
She & HER exists to give sapphics somewhere to belong. Community first, then self, then someone.
I'm a data scientist. I built product at Google, and before that Microsoft, Etsy and Nordstrom. I'm a Black sapphic woman from Houston, and I sat on the board of Pride Houston.
So I know what it costs to hold a festival together. I'm not proposing to hand you a project.
