Students dressed in full luau attire joined with others dressed in kimonos at a festival for world change on ASU’s Tempe campus.
The South Side Festival for World Change, held Thursday night at Barrett, the Honors College Academic Complex, was created to celebrate and bring awareness to cultural diversity at ASU.
“We don’t want students to just be tolerant of other cultures, we want them to accept them,” said anthropology sophomore Stephanie Tate. “But students can’t accept other cultures if they aren’t aware of them.”
Tate and Jesus Casado, who are both members of First Year Residential Experience, a residential community designed to support students in their first year of university life, created the festival. They collaborated with members of Adelphi Commons II, who were working on a similar idea, to make the dream into a reality.
Casado and Tate decided to create the festival in order to make students aware of the diversity on campus.
“We wanted to allow students a chance to experience a small portion of what this University and the world has to offer them,” said Tate.
Casado, a global studies and political science junior, said there were four main elements to the festival.
The first was charity. Though it was not required, students were invited to give either food or toiletry donations. Their donations would go toward the International Rescue Committee, a nonprofit organization that works with refugees.
The second was awareness. The festival hosted 13 different diversity-related clubs, including ASU’s chapter of the Association Internationale des Etudiants en Sciences Economiques et Commerciales, the largest student-run international organization in the world. AIESEC focuses on raising global awareness among young people in order to make the world a better place.
The third element was food. Aramark provided them with a wide range of cuisines from different cultures that students were welcome to enjoy at no cost.
The fourth was diversity through performance. They created a student remake of Michael Jackson’s classic “We are the World” music video. Fourteen students auditioned to be part of the video, which also featured clips of students’ ideas about diversity. This song was also performed at the festival. Other performances included hula, hip-hop and Bollywood-style dancing.
To go along with the idea of diversity, each club, including the ASU Global Devils, the Global Studies Students Organization, and the Hawaiian Pacific-Islander Club, had a table at which students were invited to participate in a small interactive activity. After performing the activity, students were awarded with a diversity bracelet. The student with the most bracelets at the end of the night won a prize.
Supply chain management freshman Haleigh Hoffmanner said she appreciated what the festival was offering.
“It’s really refreshing to see diversity on campus,” she said. “Back home in Wisconsin, I don’t get to experience enough diversity.”
Reach the reporter at danielle.legler@asu.edu
