Open to All® Partners with Yelp to Support LGBTQ-owned Businesses and Safe Places to Celebrate Pride

We know that building a stronger country means everyone should feel safe, respected and accepted as they live, shop and work.

Yet far too often, we hear stories of discrimination, such as a same-sex couple getting kicked out of an Uber, a Black woman targeted at a restaurant, Muslim women ordered to leave a café, people with disabilities being harassed in a restaurant or an employee being fired just for being gay or transgender.

This Pride season, we’re continuing our partnership with Yelp to make it easier to find safe and welcoming businesses to celebrate LGBTQ equality, which is more important than ever given hate violence at an all-time high. We’re thrilled to partner with Yelp to help users identify not only LGBTQ-owned businesses, but also the hundreds of thousands of Open to All businesses that will celebrate equality not only during Pride, but year-round.

Starting today, Yelp is introducing an LGBTQ-owned business attribute that will allow business owners to self-identify as LGBTQ-owned. In addition, restaurant, food and nightlife businesses that identify as LGBTQ-owned and Open to All will be highlighted on Yelp with rainbow-colored map pins for the entire month of June to help people find safe and welcoming places to celebrate Pride Month.

Yelp partnered with Open to All in July 2018 to introduce the “Open to All” attribute in response to the Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission case, which allowed a baker to turn away a gay couple seeking a wedding cake, as well as a number of racial profiling cases where customers of color were turned away or even arrested.

Today, over 581,000 businesses have indicated that they are Open to All on Yelp. We’re continuing to build on our partnership by celebrating businesses that have taken the pledge to be a safe and welcoming place for everyone.

The latest Yelp attribute identifying LGBTQ-owned businesses illustrates the values of Open to All. It follows recent new attributes that help consumers support not only Open to All businesses, but also the Latinx-, AAPI- and Black-owned attributes. This is yet another example of how the company is, once again, showing up for their users and the businesses on their platform.

This isn’t the first time Yelp has integrated features that support the LGBTQ community. In 2017, Yelp’s Gender-neutral Restroom business attribute was released, and today, over 426,000 businesses have indicated that they offer gender-neutral restrooms.

Open to All is a national nondiscrimination campaign based around the idea that everyone should be welcome regardless of race, ethnicity, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, immigration status, religion or disability. We believe we all have something to contribute. We believe we can all learn from each other. We believe that when we work together, when we value our employees, when we care for our customers and each other, we all thrive.

We’re a growing coalition of more than 200 non-profits, from CenterLink, Freedom for All Americans, the Equality Federation and other LGBTQ groups to civil rights organizations, racial justice groups, disability groups, faith organizations and more.

Never before have so many businesses and nonprofits joined together in a single, unified campaign that sends the message that everyone is welcome, valued and respected. Because when a business is open to the public, it should be open to all.

Let us know how you’ll be celebrating Pride on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook at @OpenToAllofUs and @Yelp.