In the beginning of February, Rayzel Palakiko hosted and planned Multicultural week to be celebrated April 21-26, from LTA’s to the Multicultural fest Friday night.

“The biggest intention for Multicultural Week is to be able to celebrate the diverse cultures on our campus and allow our students and staff to embrace their cultures without having to worry about any negativity, ”Palakiko said. “We want everyone to feel included, safe and most importantly respected. We discuss how many events we want for the week, do we want a dress up day, should we do this or that and advertisement is a huge thing that plays a part of the planning process as well. Being able to reach everyone on campus so people are aware of what Multicultural Week is, and what it means is really important to me. One of many pieces of advice given to us was, ‘start with a low hanging fruit’ meaning start small and in later years, we can work to improve in certain areas to go bigger and bigger. This is our first official Multicultural Week on campus since 2021. It takes a village to plan these types of events for our school and without the collaboration of our cultural clubs, leadership and admin, we couldn’t have made this possible.”

by SOFIA DUNMORE & JULIA LEVERON HIDALGO

Gallery • 10 Photos

At 9:30 a.m., Emerson Sayles and Celeste Ruiz open paper flowers to place trees on campus. “I am the [Co-President] and founder of Hispanic and Latin Culture Club. During my sophomore year, I met my cofounder on campus and together we started Hispanic and Latin Culture Club,” Celeste Ruiz said. “For Multicultural Week our club's goal is to create and showcase our schools diversity and inclusion to those on campus. Starting December, HLCC, AYLA, BSU and Multicultural club reached out to ASB to plan for this event and since then we have met once a month to brainstorm and finalize our vision for Culture Fest. During set up we had members from each club help decorate campus with ribbon and pom poms on trees, chalk the walk ways as well as create and hang posters around campus. It’s important to have Multicultural Week so that we can shine a light to our diverse student population and encourage those of different backgrounds to learn more about other cultures.” Photo by Julia Leveron Hidalgo.