World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development

Snohomish County Human Rights Commission

The World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development

Sunday, May 21, 2017 at the Edmonds Senior Center, 1:30 - 3:30pm

Join elected officials, community leaders and your neighbors to celebrate our social and cultural diversity as we discuss current events, and encourage people and organizations to take concrete action to support diversity.

Goals:

• To raise awareness about the importance of inter-cultural dialogue, diversity and inclusion.
• To build a community of individuals committed to support diversity with real and every day-life gestures.
• To combat polarization and stereotypes to improve understanding and cooperation among people from different cultures.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity was adopted in 2001 affirming the conviction that inter-cultural dialogue is the best guarantee of peace and to reject outright the theory of the inevitable clash of cultures and civilizations.

It raises cultural diversity to the level of “the common heritage of humanity:, “as necessary for humankind as biodiversity is for nature”.

It recognizes culture and dialogue as essential for development, that cultural diversity must be preserved as an adaptive process and as a capacity for expression, creation and innovation.

The Declaration aims both to preserve cultural diversity as a living, and thus renewable treasure, that must not be perceived as being unchanging heritage but as a process guaranteeing the survival of humanity; and to prevent segregation and fundamentalism which, in the name of cultural differences, would sanctify those differences and so counter the message of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Snohomish County is undergoing an explosion of diversity with profound social and cultural change with an increasingly diverse population base 14.5% of us are born in other countries.

Snohomish County Human Rights Commission is committed to the full implementation of the human rights and fundamental freedoms proclaimed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Universal Declaration for Cultural Diversity, which sets against inward looking fundamentalism the prospect of a more open, creative and democratic world.