For the second time in 2022, the Cool Gamer Retirement Home banded together for a charity event . We threw a pride parade in Minecraft (Jun. 13 – Jul. 1) where we celebrated our identities and worked hard to raise money for the Trevor Project, to protect and support LGBT youth.

Our community has grown this year. It’s only fitting that we absolutely smashed this goal as well. We raised $869 (nice) for the Trevor Project.

I Love a Parade

To account for doubling our amount of featured content creators, showcase our stream team members and friends, we opted for a two week-long stream-a-thon, with a grand finale scheduled at the end of the month. Streamers were welcome to continue raising money and streaming on the server, or streaming other Minecraft-related things throughout the month of June. And many of them did!

Each streamer built and decorated a pride parade float. We had a lovely riverside gallery, the Hall of Fame, where donors got their names added to the wall. Many sponsors chose to have a statue erected in their honor, which quickly became one of the most popular incentives.

RedriaPlays came up with the idea, and the CGRH came together to terraform and expand the river, to build the parade float bases, and to clear the area for other potential incentive building. We even started building retirement bungalows so that we could kick back and relax after our hard-earned charity success.

The original plan would have had the PrideCraft Participants split into two servers – one for Java and one for Bedrock. However, a week before the event Kickoff stream, Microsoft announced that anyone who had previously paid for a copy of Java Minecraft was going to receive access to Bedrock Minecraft (AKA Minecraft for Windows) free of charge. This changed the game completely, as we were able to have everyone build together in one place instead of fractured and separated. It was very pride-friendly of them. We were also able to change up the charity finale – Redria and Momdria prepared a minigame arena where two teams of players raced to find and dye a wool of every color. With everyone together in Bedrock Minecraft, the Rainbow Race was much easier to spectate.

We thought $622 for 06/2022 was definitely ambitious for a community that is a bunch of broke woke millennials pretending to be retired, but after smashing our previous charity goal, we wanted to aim higher.

There were some charity incentives – including art, plant cuttings, Minecraft statues, and more!

SekhmetLives

I had so much fun joining the CGRH for PrideCraft! Redria is an amazing event planner and had some really cool ideas for a charity collaboration. The Trevor Project is a great organization and I was honored to help raise money to support their work. Most of my experience in Minecraft has been creative building (not that I’m very good at it lol), so I had a great time designing floats and building statues for charity. I’m very much looking forward to the Retirement Home’s next charity event!

Nahtagain

I was blown away with how much fun I had during Pridecraft. I’m not frequently a Minecraft player but even just building a raft and my own little house was fun, I raised so much more than I ever thought. Plus, Redria created a really fun game that they explained so well and even an amateur like me could figure out!! Working together with everyone was a great time, and I can’t wait for the next one!!

Thequeernote

Thequeernote teamed up with their bestie Shay to create a lovely pride parade float and a relaxing beach house. The dynamic duo have been long-time supporters of the CGRH and both mod for Redria when they are able.

Minecraft. A game where not even the sky is the limit. There’s endless possibilities how you approach the game, what you do with it and what you take away from it.

My first experience with minecraft was in its early days, long before it was even officially released. Classmates of mine played it while it was still in its alpha phases and raved about it. I didn’t think much of it at the time, not knowing it would one day become the best selling game worldwide.

Years later, after it had been fully released, my younger brother became interested in the game and asked me to play with him. Back then we played on the XBox 360. I remember that they had a tutorial world in those versions and for the longest time, that was what I played. They had a pre built castle to explore which was fascinating to me! It gave me a sense of exploration I loved, cherished and was familiar with from other favourites such as Banjo-Kazooie and The Legend of Zelda but it combined that with the creative freedom I felt when playing The Sims or Harvest Moon. I was hooked!

Over countless of hundreds of hours I built myself a world of my own. With a luxury house, seaport, island getaway, desert paradise, underground train systems and automated farms I felt like a God.
But then there came a limit. Literally. You see, the versions of minecraft back then were not infinite like the ones today. One day my map was fully explored and there was nothing more to see. At least not in the kingdom I built myself. Once the game updated and they added the (at the time) mysterious jungle biome, it simply didn’t appear in my world because the limit had been reached. I was frustrated with the game and put it down. That was more than a decade ago.

The minecraft of today is everything I loved back then and… So. Much. More.

When I first started watching Redria on Twitch, I remember watching them play Minecraft Dungeons. I was intrigued because it reminded me of the great experience I had back then.

Then came a joint adventure on their server where we were literally bridging clouds! I was back.

Not too long after that I got to work and built an entire adventure map for my best friend in Minecraft which took me months to perfect! The joy I felt playing the game was just the same as I felt all those years ago.
So when the Pridecraft event was announced I knew I had to be part of it. Playing Minecraft with friends together for a good cause? That sounded like music to my ears.

It was such a joy to play together at times or to enter the world again and see what had been built in my absence. I feel like we each inspired each other in one way or another. The creative builts and the floats everyone came up with were each unique yet so complementary to each other.

With the experience I’ve gathered from creating that adventure map, I offered my help in setting up a fireworks show for the finale of the event which turned out beautifully in my opinion.

I’m proud to have been part of the event and that we were able to raise $869 for the Trevor Project through donations of viewers, friends and family members. The money is going to a good place.

I’m also happy to have been brought back to the game and what we’ve done since. Many great projects and events have already or will happen in the future, that I’m looking forward to.

In the end, what I do take away from the game and projects like these is pure joy. It is good to be part of something special like this! Thank you to everyone involved for making these things happen!

Yeaboomerang

Participating in Pridecraft was an absolute blast! We raised a lot of money for the Trevor Project, which means a lot to me, a trans lesbian, at a time where trans rights are being attacked across both the US and the world. My Minecraft experience mostly comes from helping with friend’s creative builds and watching content creators, so while I’ve picked up some techniques, there’s still a lot I don’t know. This can make it a little difficult during creative builds because I’m unsure whether what I want to do in my head is possible ingame, and how I would go about it. Though once you finish a build you’re proud of, it’s an amazing feeling. When I was building my parade float, I had one concept for the floor and that was it. The realization towards the end of the design process that I could put a miniature parkour course using my existing build as a framework really made it feel complete and mine, and it was very fulfilling. I also got very good at building and coloring pixel art statues with the help of Redria and Sekhmet, building six in total. It was an honor to be included in this charity event, and I look forward to the next one!

Katryam

Bill Gates (specifically) did me dirty the week I was supposed to do my Pridecraft stream. There were various things that happened that week:

• I had an emergency communications thing happen at work surrounding Office and some licensing problems we were having.
• I recorded the first episode of my podcast, Literally Two Cents About Content!, and it was very specifically about how Bill Gates foretold the content industry, which I have lost years of my life to.
• I was unable to play Minecraft because of some sort of problem with the connection between the Mojang and Microsoft servers. I spent several days that week trying to get my account to connect so that I could play. Redria and I had a couple troubleshooting phone calls… Nothing doin’.

Theoretically, I would have loved to play Minecraft that week. Mr. Gates had other plans for me. (Maybe because I complained too loudly on the internet about content.)

However!

I loved seeing everyone’s creations. The floats were awesome – and the sky Poke’mon had me rolling. I’m so proud of everyone coming up with these creative ideas and raising as much money as we did for The Trevor Project. I am proud to know this group of streamers and happy that we are putting our energy toward things that provide real assistance for marginalized groups.

Hopefully next stream event, I’ll get to participate!!!

RedriaPlays

I was blown out of the water after our #TeamSeas Raft charity event. We targeted $222, which even I was nervous about hitting. Never in my wildest dream would I have hoped to more than double our goal. It’s both exciting and nerve-wracking to surpass these targets. What if we miss our next goal? How will we know where to set it?

So I called out for help. I sent up a beacon, asking other content creators if they wanted to join in on a collaboration. We decided to raise money for the Trevor Project as a way to celebrate our queer family in the Cool Gamer Retirement Home. And we all had access to Minecraft, across various platforms. Thus, PrideCraft was born.

With ten streamers (double our previous event), and a month to raise money (double our previous event), it made sense to… double our goal! Well, it would have, but we decided to target $622 for 06/2022. Another lofty, nerve-wracking goal.

The set-up for this charity collaboration felt like a breeze. I had a few people willing to log on and help with some pre-show building, like setting up the empty charity floats, or making a hall of fame. Some people helped make posters for the event. My mom even helped me design and build the course for our final minigame. The hardest thing was probably scheduling – trying to fit ten different people across two weeks to spread out the streams, trying to avoid overlap and get as many people as possible involved in our big finale stream. It’s never an easy feat, but making a calendar and letting people pick their stream times proved to be the simplest solution. The second hardest thing was the last-minute switch to move everyone into Bedrock Minecraft. Originally, we were going to be split across two servers- one Java and one Bedrock. A week before the event, Microsoft gifted all players with access to Java Minecraft a copy of Bedrock Minecraft. This would let us all play together on one server at the same time, and changed the collaboration completely. For the better.

I’m always mesmerized by the kind of creativity that Minecraft brings out in people. We were joined by a few Minecraft newcomers, a few Minecraft veterans, and had lots of different levels in between. To celebrate Pride Month and raise money for Trevor Project, we decorated pride parade floats that drifted through our river and around our festival grounds. Every single parade float ended up being unique, a perfect fingerprint for each of our featured streamers. Many of us had so much fun, that we streamed multiple times during our campaign. If our donors gave at least $8 to the cause, we offered to build statues in their honor. This proved to be one of the best decisions of the entire collaboration. We ended up with Shrek, Megamind, Madeleine, a potato, a handful of Pokemon, and – my personal favorite – a Breath of the Wild-inspired parkour shrine.

Minecraft is a game that single-handedly carried me through some very trying college years. I played almost every night, either grinding resources in Survival mode, or coming up with very intricate build projects in Creative mode. My sophomore year of college, I started a Minecraft Club and we were able to do a lot of volunteering at college-run events to entertain local children. I made a lot of friends on an online server that I would go on to co-run with the owner, some rando in Wisconsin that I’ve had the absolute joy of meeting three times in real life. Twice were at weddings – once for his, and once for mine. This silly block game has had a huge impact on my life. I’ve fallen in and out of love with Minecraft over the years as I find other games to play, but it’s surprising how easy it is to fall back into it.

When I first started streaming on Twitch, Minecraft was one of the first games I streamed. I kept jokingly telling my mom that I was going to be her next favorite Hermitcraft streamer. Little did I know Minecraft with Mom would become such a staple on my channel (and that she’d be streaming it with me). And now that our community server, CirrusSMP, has just launched its second map, I feel like it’s here to stay. Some of our featured streamers played a vanilla Skyblock campaign in October. You can check out the VODs on my YouTube channel!

Conclusion

During Pridecraft, we raised $622 for the Trevor Project. More than that, we came together as a community to show support and make it known that the CGRH is a retirement home for all humans. This huge success would not have been possible without the help of everyone who participated, donated, cheered, and watched. And most of all, thank you, whoever is reading this, for helping us make CGRH a true family. Here’s to Pridecraft 2023!