Revelers taking part in pride events this month are sure to see flashy, rainbow-adorned displays celebrating the LGBTQ community and the progress it has made. They’ll also probably spot corporate logos.

In recent years, pride festivals and parades feting the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer community have elicited more participation and sponsorships from major corporations. While this influx of support has allowed these events to expand in size, it has also drawn the ire of activists who say the corporate involvement distracts from the purpose of these gatherings.

“There’s a group of folks who are frustrated by the fact that there are so many corporate logos in the parade and the biggest floats are advertising to our community,” said Drew Ambrogi, an organizer with No Justice No Pride, a collective of organizers who staged a protest during the Capital Pride parade in Washington, D.C., earlier in June.

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The group’s concerns extended beyond the mere presence of for-profit companies at the event. The organizers were also critical of some of the sponsors because of their business decisions. “Just because you support your gay employees or put up rainbow flags, doesn’t mean you should receive our support,” Ambrogi said.

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Capital Pride isn’t alone in attracting financial support from corporate sponsors. This year, New York City Pride has 61 corporate sponsors, 13 promotional partners and 31 media sponsors. San Francisco has 56 corporate sponsors for 2017. Boston’s pride event earlier this month had 44 sponsors (not including hospitality, media and community partners), while the pride event set to take place in Austin, Texas, has 19 sponsors.

And being a sponsor doesn’t come cheap. The NYC Pride March collected $1.7 million via sponsorships last year, and companies paid $30,000 on average to become a sponsor, according to data obtained by Forbes. (The organization did not provide specifics regarding the costs of sponsorship for the 2017 parade.)

Corporate sponsorship is not a new development. NYC Pride saw its first corporate sponsors in the 1990s, according to James Fallarino, media director for NYC Pride. Resistance to the corporate influence is similarly longstanding — the Boston Dyke March, for example, was formed in 1995 as a reaction to this trend. To this day, the event positions itself as an alternative to the official pride celebrations and remains grass roots.

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For major pride events though, corporate sponsors represent a major — and irreplaceable — source of the event’s funding. “We wouldn’t have been able to grow into who we are today, the size and scope of the events, without the corporate sponsorships,” Fallarino said. “I don’t know if we’d even be able to produce just the march and two other events without corporate donations.”

And many of the companies that sponsor these events don’t just provide support for one. Wells Fargo WFC, +1.37% , a long-time supporter of LGBTQ pride events, is providing $50 million of support to roughly 60 pride celebrations nationwide this year, including the ones in Washington, New York and Los Angeles. “We just see it as the right thing to do,” said Kali Caldwell, senior communications consultant at Wells Fargo.

Many companies will also pay to have a float or group march in the parades, even if they’re not a sponsor. And that’s not surprising, given that the LGBTQ community represents a large consumer base. In the U.S., the total buying power of LGBTQ adults adds up to nearly $1 trillion, according to a 2016 report from Witeck Communications, a communications firm that specializes in LGBT outreach.

Nevertheless, companies and their employees don’t necessarily make up the majority of those joining in these celebrations. For instance, NYC Pride has more than 450 groups registered for the march on June 25, but 75% of those are nonprofits, Fallarino said. “While the floats from the corporate sponsors might be the things that people remember from the event, it is by far not the dominant element in the march,” he said.

For those who do participate alongside the companies marching in the parade, whether they are corporate sponsors or not, it can be a rewarding experience. Douglas Hanna, who works as the general manager of the developer platform at customer service software company Zendesk, marched with his employer last year in San Francisco’s pride parade. Having moved to the Bay Area six months prior with his boyfriend, Hanna said marching in the parade gave him a chance to connect with the LGBT community — both in his new home and at his new employer. “You should be proud of your workplace and what it represents,” he said.

Zendesk began participating in San Francisco Pride in 2012, according to Tiffany Apczynski, the company’s vice president of public policy and social impact. The company’s annual participation in the parade has since led the company to create an LGBT-affinity employee-resource group and to hire a diversity and inclusion manager.

“ “If you do it for the right reasons, rather than it just being a billboard for your product, you will build trust that you are there because you want to be an ally.” ” — Tiffany Apczynski, vice president of public policy and social impact at Zendesk

While participating in the parade has benefited Zendesk and its employees, Apczynski said she understands where critics of corporations’ presence are coming from. “Having witnessed the pride parade since 1994, I remember when it was only nonprofits and LGBTQ performers,” she said. “Now that we have more corporate sponsors that are allowed to be in the parade, in addition to it feeling like it’s watered down some of the intent, what it’s also done is make the parade really long.”

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After its first year participating in the pride parade, Zendesk invited nonprofits to join its employees in the parade on the company’s float. The company pays the nonprofits’ expenses associated with participating in the parade and allows them to wear their own shirts. Zendesk also keeps its own branding on its float limited, only including some for accountability purposes, Apczynski said. “It is prohibitively expensive to be in the pride parade for a lot of nonprofits, so we’ve always done our best to keep any kind of branding super minimal so it feels like an agnostic float,” she said.

Regarding concerns voiced by those frustrated with the “corporatization” of pride, Fallarino said that a certain level of corporate presence will exist so long as companies’ LGBTQ employee-resource groups are participants. (Any group that registers can be part of the march if they follow the event’s policies.) As for sponsors, Fallarino said that NYC Pride currently evaluates interested parties based on various metrics — for instance, if a company has a low rating on the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index, which ranks firms based on their policies regarding LGBTQ employees, then NYC Pride will turn down its sponsorship offer. Nevertheless, he said that NYC Pride’s organizers are open to working with critics to determine other ways of evaluating who is accepted as a sponsor. “We respect their perspective and we’re open to having a dialogue about that,” Fallarino said.

One way that Apczynski believes companies and pride organizers could assuage some of these concerns is by adopting similar principles to Zendesk’s inclusion of nonprofits. “Maybe you have to take on a certain percentage of nonprofits, and the nonprofits get top billing,” she said. “If you do it for the right reasons, rather than it just being a billboard for your product, you will build trust that you are there because you want to be an ally.”