In honour of Pride Month, join us in celebrating the LGBTQIA+ community across multiple toys in Pok Pok while building on the importance of inclusivity, diversity and celebrating community.

What is Pride Month all about?

Pride Month is celebrated globally with a special focus on the LGBTQIA+ community and the impact they’ve had on the world. It originated in the United States to commemorate the Stonewall Riots, which occurred at the end of June 1969. The Stonewall riots were a response by members of the gay community to Police raiding the Stonewall Inn, an LGBT bar in Greenwich Village. A year later, on June 28, the first Gay Pride march took place all across the USA to mark this anniversary.

Starting in 1999, three presidents of the United States have officially declared June as Pride Month. Since then, many countries followed suit and LGBTQIA+ communities all around the world started celebrating Pride Month in their own ways.

How Pok Pok is celebrating Pride Month

Pok Pok has always featured LGBTQIA+ individuals, as we have always strived to be a reflection of the world in all its diversity. Our Busy Book has included LGBTQIA+ folks from the start and normalizing these family constructs. For Pride, we’re taking things to the next level, celebrating these wonderful folks with a big Pride gathering in our Town Event Space. We also added a bunch of colourful decorations and new outfits in House and Shops!

Why celebrating Pride is so important to us

At Pok Pok, one of our guiding principles is that we strive to ground our app in reality. There are a lot of apps out there using talking animals as the main characters, and while they are wonderful and cute, we feel strongly that our app needs to feature humans and families of all kinds.

Fun fact: Some of our first 1-star reviews were about the fact that we included a number of LGBTQIA+ people in Busy Book. Some people felt that we were “pushing the gay agenda” onto your kids. We actually feel very strongly that it’s the exact opposite, and we have to admit: we wear these reviews as a badge of honour.

LGBTQIA+ folks all over the world are fighting every day for their voices to be heard and to have their existences validated, and every day, people are trying to silence their voices. By spreading disinformation and lies, banning them from bathrooms, excluding them from conversations or attacking them; people desperately try to force this community to go back into hiding. This doesn’t stop LGBTQIA+ people from existing, but it endangers their lives and freedom. At Pok Pok, we feel we have a unique opportunity to contribute to a more equal world.

Children need windows and mirrors in their lives.

They need a window on the world to see things that are different from their own situation, to widen their world view and grow empathy. They also need a mirror to recognize themselves and their families and see their world represented as well. While this is improving in kids media, it’s still lacking when it comes to representation and diversity; they’re afraid to bring politics into their brand. We at Pok Pok try to do the opposite: this is not politics, this is life, and we’re not shying away from it.

As we add more Pride content to our app, we are aware that we’re not going to single-handedly change the world with this — but if there’s only one kid out there that recognizes their parents, their friends, themselves, and feels validated in their existence, that’s when we know we’ve made a small dent in the universe.

In that spirit, we’re also happy to share that our team will be making a donation that will go towards supporting the LGBTQIA+ community.

We’re always so inspired by the way kids interact with Pok Pok and continue to play, learn and grow, and we can’t wait to hear what families like yours think of our little update! We’d love to receive your feedback, see your play videos and hear your ideas — share your thoughts and say hello at hello@playpokpok.com or on social media @playpokpok.

The Pride Update is available now in the latest update of Pok Pok Playroom!

Join our community to get insights from our educators and take a peek behind the scenes into our toy design process over on our Instagram!