About fifteen years ago, KishaLynn Elliott’s wife bought her a $12 ring at San Diego Pride.
The couple, then living in Long Beach, had already been married for three years, but Elliott was in need of a new wedding ring — her old one no longer fit. As they walked through the vendors at the Pride Festival, a ring caught her eye with the word “love” on one side and “unconditional” on the other.
It was a perfect fit, and the start of Elliott’s journey in San Diego.
“We definitely drove home saying ‘We’re moving,’ and the next year we’re here,” she said. “I wear San Diego Pride on my finger every day as a symbol of our love and our history.”
Elliott is now the new executive director of San Diego Pride, a nonprofit that hosts the city’s annual Pride festival and parade in July and year-round programming for the LGBTQ+ community. Over years of working in nonprofits, she says she sees the job as a way to connect her identity as a Black lesbian with her work in the community.
Elliott takes the helm after years of turnover at the top — she’s the seventh person to lead San Diego Pride since 2023, but only the third permanent one — and as the organization re-evaluates its mission and strategy.
She takes over as the Trump administration and Republicans around the country have made rolling back LGBTQ+ rights a key part of their agenda. And she’s leading San Diego Pride after a tumultuous last year, when concerns about its transparency and decision-making boiled over just months before its 2025 parade and festival.
Elliott, who started in January, says she’ll be able to bring “calm to chaos” at the organization and within the community.
“Stabilization is my jam,” Elliott said.
“Being effective means stabilizing our mission,” she added. “Having the celebration, having the parade, having the fun — and then continuing the work throughout the year.”
The executive director position is one of several recent changes to San Diego Pride’s leadership. The nonprofit also hired a new director of advocacy and programs, Brock Cavett, in January, and two new board members started last fall.
Elliott, 45, moved to California in 2004, and to San Diego about seven years later. Originally from Ohio, she studied English at Spelman College, the historically Black women’s college in Atlanta.
Her first job was in real estate, but it wasn’t fulfilling, she said. When she arrived in California, she considered law school but saw nonprofits as an avenue to get to work right away, with a focus on education. She worked for the California Charter Schools Association in Los Angeles and later in San Diego.
KishaLynn Elliott is the executive director of San Diego Pride, seen here on March 2, 2026, in San Diego. (K.C. Alfred / The San Diego Union-Tribune)
In 2013, she joined the Monarch School Project, a San Diego-based nonprofit that supports education for unhoused students. She started as the organization’s director of life skills, part of a career development initiative, and worked her way up to ultimately serve five years as chief operating officer.
In her time there, she’s proudest of helping the Monarch School scale its impact and leading it through the COVID-19 pandemic, including through distanced learning — experiences she says taught her about crisis management and operational stability.
It was also personal for her. Throughout high school, she and her mother were unhoused, she said — an experience that drew her to the Monarch School.
“It was going to college as a first-generation college student that rehoused me,” Elliott said. “So Monarch’s mission really resonated with me.”
Today, she sees the connection between homeless youths and the LGBTQ+ community, especially in the current political climate. LGBTQ+ people, including youths, are at greater risk of homelessness.
“We’re fighting systems of oppression that affect all of us,” Elliott said. “It’s all about human dignity.”
But she acknowledges that compared with many other nonprofits, San Diego Pride has a greater sense of joy baked into its mission, pointing to the annual festival and parade that draws over 300,000 people each year.
Elliott says she spent her first month there learning and listening to staff and the community, including at meetings and events like the Art of Pride exhibition in January. Her goal is to scale up San Diego Pride’s philanthropic efforts and help bolster the nonprofit’s year-round advocacy and programming.
San Diego Pride gave $70,000 in community grants to groups in 2025, including Proyecto Translatinas, Viet Voices and the Lambda Archives of San Diego. That’s much less community grant funding than in years past. In 2019, it gave over $340,000 — but that number has steadily declined each year since.
Spokesperson Joslyn Hatfield says the nonprofit is pursuing new forms of fundraising, including an inaugural Fabric of Pride fashion show this month that aims to raise $100,000 to help fund programming — including community grants.
Participants take part in carrying the large Pride flag, while others enjoy walking under the flag as they march down Sixth Avenue during the San Diego Pride Parade in Hillcrest on Saturday, July 19, 2025. (Nelvin C. Cepeda / The San Diego Union-Tribune)
Such programming will have a new leader in Cavett, San Diego Pride’s new director of advocacy and programs, who started the same day as Elliott. “It definitely created a bond between us,” he said.
Cavett most recently was the director of programming at UC Riverside’s alumni office and the director of advocacy for Riverside Pride. At San Diego Pride, he’s most eager to expand the nonprofit’s advocacy, especially in an election year, and to strengthen its civic action team, a volunteer group that connects with voters and LGBTQ+ advocates.
He also wants to grow San Diego Pride’s Youth Leadership Academy, an annual event to educate youths on advocacy and LGBTQ+ history.
Already, San Diego Pride is in the midst of a strategic planning update that will guide its mission for the coming years.
Last year, it faced criticism over its choice of a festival headliner and public concerns over what some community members said had been failures of transparency, poor community engagement and lackluster year-round programming.
Elliott says she understands the community concerns, especially with so much leadership turnover. That upheaval, she says, prevented Pride from focusing on its mission.
“Yes, there’s a festival and parade now, but there is also real call to action,” she said. “To increase pride, respect and equality for the movement, the community around the world — that is the actual mission work.”
In recent months, San Diego Pride says it has conducted community feedback sessions to solicit input that will help guide its new strategic plan. Board co-chair Joshua Dunn says it has created an ad hoc committee of board and staff members, led by Elliott, that will now be tasked with writing the plan. They met for the first time Friday.
“Continuing to focus on the community healing and the strategic planning process is going to be vital,” Dunn said.
For her part, Elliott aims to be transparent “in a way that may feel even radical” compared to the past and wants to be held accountable for the plans she proposes.
She says she’s also committed to the work and won’t leave before San Diego Pride is on the right track.
“I won’t be satisfied until I have permanently stabilized the organization’s mission for its next 50 years,” she said.