Meet the founders of the Affirming Business Institute
Hello, we're Allison (they/them) and Amanda (she/her).
We started the Affirming Business Institute to connect the queer community to queer-affirming businesses.
.jpg)
Why did we start the Affirming Business Institute?
When we were planning our wedding, we had a hard time finding vendors we were sure would be excited about a queer wedding and knew how to show up for us. We wanted vendors who would use Allison’s pronouns without a second thought, celebrate our relationship for exactly what it is, and never make us feel othered, even by accident.
We spent months reading websites, scrolling portfolios, studying inquiry forms, and asking friends for recommendations just to build a list to start from. Even with a rainbow flag in someone’s footer, we couldn’t tell whether they’d know what to do once we were in the room together.
When we talked with friends about it, we learned this wasn’t only a wedding problem, and it wasn’t only ours. We heard story after story about doctors, hair stylists, therapists, technicians, store owners, and servers. A doctor insisting on birth control to our lesbian friend in a committed relationship. A hair stylist spent an entire appointment referring to our friend's fiancee as "he" even though she repeatedly corrected her pronouns. A venue intake form only had fields for a bride or a groom, so our friends had to rock-paper-scissor over who had to be in the groom field. A therapist got uncomfortable the first time our friend brought up his boyfriend.
Our friends paid these businesses and still walked away feeling uncomfortable, and most of the time, the person on the other side of the counter had no idea anything had gone wrong. Nobody had ever shown them what to do differently, and that told us training could change a lot of these moments before they happened.
Now more than ever, the queer community needs an easier way to find businesses that can support us without question, and businesses that want to serve the LGBTQ+ community from an educated and informed place need a place to learn how. Between our experience in business and our years as organizers and educators in the queer community, we knew we could build both.
Our efforts became the Affirming Business Institute
We hire queer experts in each industry to create and teach our courses, so a wedding photographer learns from a queer wedding photographer who knows the work firsthand, a wedding vendor can learn from another queer wedding vendor, and eventually, we'll hire other queer industry experts to teach other courses.
Through our Institute arm, businesses learn how to ask better questions, update their forms and contracts, prepare their teams, and learn how to look at their jobs outside of the default heteronormative and cisgendered lenses they were taught. To earn certification, they pass a final assessment, and they have to pass an assessment every two years to stay listed so their training stays top of mind and current.
Our role is to make sure every course meets the same standard. We guide our instructors through building their courses, drawing on our backgrounds in education, and we review each one before it launches so it reflects what we’ve heard from our years in queer community spaces.
We're starting with the wedding industry, but we're not stopping here
Our first certifications are for wedding photographers and wedding professionals, since weddings are where our own search began. Next, we’re building courses for more industries, so the doctors, stylists, and service providers our friends told us about will all have a place to learn too.
We're excited you found us and can't wait to see what the future holds!
- Amanda and Allison