When Matthew Danielson, 38, took the reins of Spokane Pride in 2023, the circumstances were less than ideal.

The nonprofit’s board president at the time abruptly left two months ahead of the nonprofit’s largest annual event, the Spokane Pride Parade & Festival.

Danielson rose to the occasion, though, and successfully led the event that brought tens of thousands of attendees to Riverfront Park that year.

He may not have been able to pull it off, he says, if not for his best friend, Jeff Olson. Olson passed away in 2022 and left Danielson with some funds, which allowed him to take some time away from his job at nYne Bar & Bistro and focus on running Spokane Pride.

“Pride 2023 was kind of a dumpster fire, but I'm not sure it would have survived or actually happened if I hadn't been able to just not work and just totally focus on that,” says Danielson, who was running Spokane Pride in an unpaid capacity at the time.

Following the 2023 Spokane Pride Parade & Festival, most of its board, for a variety of personal reasons, ended up departing from the organization, leaving Danielson to keep the organization afloat.  

He remade the nonprofit’s board by assembling some regular volunteers. With some remaining funding available coming out of the pandemic, Danielson was voted to serve as interim executive director of Spokane Pride — the organization’s first, and still the only, paid position. He was named the permanent executive director about six months ago.

Danielson left his job at the downtown Spokane bar after he was named executive director, a move that allows him to focus exclusively on running Spokane Pride. He says he hopes to hire an assistant in a paid position at some point this year to help support the organization as it continues to grow.

Spokane Pride has continued to grow under Danielson’s leadership, with tens of thousands of people turning out for the main Pride festival in the past two years. Spokane Pride also hosts other events throughout the year. Between March 2024 and March 2025, the organization held 60 events, Danielson says.

For example, the nonprofit launched Garland Pride last year, which brought in thousands of attendees in both 2024 and 2025, Danielson estimates. While he doesn’t have exact attendee totals, he says Garland Pride has grown from 30 vendors in 2024 to over 70 vendors this year.

To make all these events happen, Spokane Pride relies on volunteer support.

Danielson oversees eight volunteer committees. He says there were around 300 volunteers at the Pride Parade & Festival this year, and many of those volunteers help out at other Pride events.

Since taking on the top leadership position, Danielson has also started what he calls the Inland Northwest Pride Network, which he describes as a mutual support group between all the Pride organizations in the region, including in North Idaho and as far away as Libby, Montana.

“I think we helped out with seven different (Pride organizations) last year,” he says, emphasizing that Spokane Pride is there to help the other organizations with anything they need, not take over their events.

He continues, “I think we're just well positioned here to help make this important change in our culture. Just create this mutual support network and a coordinated push back if we need to.”

Danielson has also helped manage a major shift in Spokane Pride’s funding model. This year, and particularly in April, Spokane Pride has lost some of its large national sponsors, including Walmart, Verizon, and Anheuser-Busch. 

Even so, donations from local organizations, such as the Episcopal Diocese of Spokane and Gonzaga University, in addition to contributions from many individuals, made up for the sponsorship losses, Danielson says.

“We’re better off financially than we’ve ever been,” he says. “I’ve always thought Pride should be more grassroots, locally funded by the institutions of the community.”

Danielson grew up in Othello, Washington, a small town not far from Moses Lake. He moved to Spokane in 2006, shortly after graduating high school, and attended Eastern Washington University, where he earned an interdisciplinary degree in music, anthropology, and gender studies.

After graduating from EWU, Danielson worked at Irv’s, a popular gay bar and club in Spokane, where he served drinks and hosted karaoke.

Learning the ins and outs of hosting karaoke sparked an interested in sound-tech work, and he eventually opened a small production, DJ, and karaoke business. Through his small business, he became involved with many different nonprofits, providing them with sound-tech services, often for free.

It was through those connections that he became engaged with Spokane Pride. He provided sound services for multiple Pride events, he says.

“That’s what led me to getting even more involved. ... In 2016, they asked me to emcee the festival,” says Danielson, referring to the Spokane Pride Parade & Festival.

The timing of that experience has left a lasting impact on Danielson, he says. That festival that year was held the same night as the Pulse nightclub massacre, in Orlando, Florida, in which 49 people were killed and dozens more were wounded in a mass shooting.

“I was having this incredibly formative experience, surrounded by all this love, this whole community, and it was just so beautiful,” he says. “And then just knowing that there was a club really similar to the one I worked in at the time with piles of people being murdered.”

Danielson says he was reminded that there’s “still a lot of work to do as a culture."

Around the same time, two of Danielson’s relatives sued the state of Oregon over marriage inequality, and ultimately contributed to same-sex couples being allowed to marry in that state, Danielson says. That event helped him realize that political action can make things happen, he says.

The combination of those two eye-opening experiences inspired Danielson to position himself at the center of change.

“It led me into joining the board and taking over all the entertainment for (Spokane) Pride, doing all the stage managing, a lot of the prep, and then gradually stepped into the production,” he says.

Now, as Spokane Pride’s leader, Danielson says he hopes to bring the LGBTQ+ community together more. He says it historically hasn’t been connected enough, so he hopes continuing to hold events and coordinate with other organizations will make the community stronger and healthier.

He also wants to see Spokane Pride create community spaces that can help with the psychological health of those in the LGBTQ+ community. He envisions the organization can contribute by connecting people with resources and services that are available through other organizations.