Allegheny College has multiple diversity clubs on campus, with goals to celebrate being unique. The Multicultural Field Day, which occurred on Sept. 22, 2019, was one of many events hosted by the college to bring the campus community together to celebrate cultural differences.

Largely facilitated by the Association for the Advancement of Black Culture and the Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, Access and Social Justice Center, the field day was the beginning of a long series of events to promote campus-wide diversity and inclusion.

“Our overall goal this year is to promote collaboration among our cultural identity and leadership coalition organizations so that we’re making sure that we are being collaborative in spirit and ensuring that there is unity within our community for underserved student populations,” said Angelica Perez-Johnston, interim director of the IDEAS Center.

This is the second year that Multicultural Field Day was held. It was an idea brought up by ABC last year, who worked with other organizations to create a well-represented afternoon of festivities.

“This year, the senior intern for the IDEAS Center helped coordinate things but all of the organizations contributed equally,” Perez-Johnston said.

In addition to the field day, Multicultural Weekend is also hosted in the spring and functions as a two-night overnight event. Perez-Johnston noted that she is planning to have the weekend be a collaborative event that includes current students as well.

“This is just the start of a lot of different programming that revolves around doing collaborations with different organizations that students may not typically collaborate with,” Perez-Johnston said. “(Multicultural Field Day) was the first in a series of events that will occur throughout the year.”

Kristin Dukes, dean for institutional diversity, noted the success of the event, from the weather to the community.

“This is a student-driven initiative,” Dukes said. “IDEAS just supports and provides resources. Whatever you need, we’ve got you, but this is the student driven event, and it’s beautiful to see that.”

Perez-Johnston and Dukes both emphasized their desire to continue planning events to promote campus diversity.

“I look forward to continued efforts of collaboration among organizations and to see more programming that’s intended to allow all students to attend, to get more presence for our organizations and ensure that they’re being supported in as meaningful of a way as possible,” Perez-Johnston said.