Jasmine Ing | Top 40 Under 40 2025

Age: 39

Occupation: Founder, Calgary Rainbow Families

Sparking change often starts with one person who is willing to take initiative — like Jasmine Ing, who has been a passionate 2SLGBTQIA+ community organizer for more than 20 years.

In 2004, a time when high school gay-straight alliances met surreptitiously to protect young people from what was often a hostile social environment, Ing planned a cross-Calgary high school “Prance” (a portmanteau of “Pride dance”) to celebrate her and her peers’ graduation year.

“It felt like we didn’t have a lot of choices,” says Ing, who at the time volunteered for the Gay and Lesbian Community Services Association (now Calgary Outlink). She adds that the choice was either to be invisible and erased or to advocate for visibility.

In addition to her extensive volunteer work (including co-chairing Queers on Campus at UCalgary and time spent as a board member for Calgary Outlink), Ing performed with One Voice Chorus — Calgary’s mixed-voice 2SLGBTQIA+ choir — for more than 10 years, and was one third of the queer feminist ukulele comedy trio, The Wrong Kind of Girls. Ing was also one of the driving forces behind the renaming of the Lois Szabo Commons, a Beltline park named to commemorate the founder of Calgary’s first gay club, Club Carousel.

After Ing and her wife had their first child in 2022, it quickly became clear to them that there was a gap to be filled in the 2SLGBTQIA+ community: a safe space where queer families could connect, feel seen and be around family structures similar to their own. In 2023, Ing founded Calgary Rainbow Families, a social group for 2SLGBTQIA+ parents and their children. The group hosts social activities with about 10 families each month.

“Right now, [Rainbow Families] is really important for us as adults, and it will be important for our kids,” says Ing, who recently had her second child. “Every family is different, and it’s important to have space for all families.”

Thank yous
“Samara Kambeitz, Tessa Davidson, Taryn Bomi, and Julie Black for the advice and support that was so instrumental to get Rainbow Families up and running; Melissa Luhtanen, Jessica Ayala, Darren Lund, and Darryl Aarbo who taught a young me it was always ok to be myself and to ask to be included; Jason Cameron for believing in my ability to make things happen as a teenager; Jane Perry for helping me find a new kind of voice; my mother, Rose; my wife (and Top 40 Alum!) Chett, and our children, Equinox and Little Nugget.”