Badass Tours is on a mission to fill in the gaps in popular history. We guide walking tours through Amsterdam telling the incredible women’s, LGBT+, Jewish, and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People Of Color) stories. These people were often relegated to archives and footnotes because they weren’t the ones writing the history books. We also bring these inspiring, intriguing, and sometimes infuriating stories to a wider audience through storytelling performances and our columns, Blamsterdam and Ask a Badass.
Badass Tours was founded in 2017 from a deep love of Amsterdam history and a desire to bring its fascinating women to the English-speaking world. While the initial tour included LGBT+, BIPOC and Jewish women, we realized these communities have more stories that need to be told. We added a canal belt tour of stories across LGBT+ history and a Plantage tour of LGBT+, BIPOC, and Jewish people. In 2023, we will launch a BIPOC history tour and a Jewish tour that primarily focuses on pre-20th-century badasses.
In 2022, we received support from the European Union’s COSME program to make these stories more widely available through a self-guided tour app. It will have a soft launch in the fall of 2022 and an official launch in February of 2023.