An on-campus organization has prepared Diversity Awareness Week 2010, a week full of events that celebrate and honor the diversity across campus.
The Central Valley Cultural Heritage Institute’s Welcoming Diversity Workshop is a program under the National Coalition Building Institute. This is a nonprofit organization that is dedicated to eliminating prejudice on campuses and communities throughout the world.
Community member Christian Hays attended this workshop last year and said it was a great experience.
“I gained an appreciation and a better understanding of people that are unlike me,” Hays said. “I was able to hear the thoughts on discrimination from people from different ethnicities, gender, religious backgrounds and sexual orientations, and it was very enlightening.”
The workshop addresses and emphasizes their core principles: every issue counts, personal stories change attitudes and eliminating mistreatment means ending leadership oppression.
The workshop also focuses on the key insights that differences among individuals need not lead to discrimination and divisiveness, that differences among groups can be a community asset and that differences on issues need not divide communities.
Senior criminology major Jennifer Gutierrez said the workshop changed her outlook on certain people.
“I was able to address the prejudices that I have held my entire life and hear the perspectives from the groups that I had once held prejudices against, and that helped me change how I view people and understand them more,” Gutierrez said.
The Welcoming Diversity Workshop is just one of the many events taking place during Diversity Awareness Week.
There will also be a workshop on campus commitment to social justice and inclusion, a local Latina leadership conference, a showing of “Invictus,” a showing of “Nanking,” a 2010 Cesar Chavez Conference, a Wong Fu production by the Amerasia organization and the 5th Annual Diversity Conference.
This conference is an all day event made up of a morning symposium and an afternoon workshop.
Diversity Awareness Week will take place during the week of April 26 through May 1. This week is not all about diversity awareness, there will also be a fundraiser throughout this week.
Mahalate Hagos, a junior criminology major and Black Student United (BSU) member, said BSU plans to hold a Got Water? Project during this week.
“There are a lot of homeless people who need clean drinking water so BSU will be collecting bottled water to give to the homeless,” Hagos said. “Those who would like to donate water can bring to the Thomas Building, room 110 by April 30.
