Diversity within the Wildrose Star Trek Club

The Wildrose Star Trek Club was founded in 2022 with a lofty goal. That goal being to build a club that not only sought to explore and express the love its members had for Star Trek, in all its incarnations; but to build that club on the foundation of IDIC (Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations).

Pride IDIC - Created by Corey Hallisey

But how were we to do this? The first steps we took were to look at the communities that were not fully accepted in the Star Trek communities available to us in Calgary. It boiled down to disabilities and the 2SLGBTQIA+ communities.

That’s when we knew we had our work cut out for us. However, just like Kirk in the Kobayashi Maru scenario, we didn’t give up. We found a way to win at all costs.

We elected a captain who was both an ally of the Alphabet Mafia and a member of the disabled community. He, in turn, appointed an executive that represented the spectrum of both the 2SLGBTQIA+ and disability community. We rallied behind him and shared his vision.

3 years later, The Wildrose Star Trek Club is independent and more inclusive than we have ever been. Our history shows our dedication to diversity and inclusion.

2023 was a landmark year for The Wildrose Star Trek Club. We took a chance and applied to march in the Calgary Pride Parade. We were accepted and thus history was made. We became the first Star Trek Fan Club to march in a pride parade in Canadian History. Our club was featured on national news and we soon realised that it didn’t stop there.

We received messages from other parts of Canada, the USA, and even as far away as Australia. These were messages of support and encouragement of what we were doing. Messages of thanks for taking the chance and being the first. People within the Star Trek community were taking notice and several told us that they were encouraged to follow our lead and take the same steps to not only embrace the disenfranchised, but to publicly put their money where their mouth was, so to speak, and enter their local pride events to show unity with that community.

We, as a club, acknowledge that the job is not done. There is always work that needs to be done. But each day that we take another step forward is a step in the right direction. We’ll never abandon the foundation on which our club is built. We encourage you, no matter what community you are a part of, to join us in our love of Star Trek and our desire to bring the vision that Gene Roddenberry shared with us in the 1960s to live in our little corner of this big ole world.

Live Long and Prosper.