Celebrating Global Cultural Heritage: The International Culture Festival 

A truly eventful year for I-House residents ended with another edition of the annual International Cultural Festival, prepared by the Robertson Center for Intercultural Leadership and Programs team. On Saturday, April 27, we opened the door to welcome over 100 guests from outside the House and to our 600 residents, who joined us to celebrate the global cultural heritage. During 4 months of work, the Center’s Program Lead Team worked hard to put together the festival, with 16 student- or association-led cultural booths, 8 performances, and the participants’ countless smiles.  

As a Program Lead, when I decided to take on the role of the Festival’s Coordinator, I knew that position came with a great set of expectations, set, and enhanced each week by all the Coffee Hours, which the residents prepared this year. I wanted our participants to have equal opportunities for cultural immersion as during DiversiTEAs but at the same time to enjoy the mosaic of cultures coming together on that day, and none of them dominating over one another. This certainly would not have been achieved without the work of my teammates, who recruited cultural booth hosts, invited professional performers, and gave them the space to express their cultures in the way they wanted them to be seen. They also worked relentlessly to promote the event, putting flyers all over the campus and creating promotional videos, to make sure everyone interested hears about the event in time. I cannot imagine a better end to the year of our cooperation which, in a similar way to the festival, leveraged multicultural diversity to create lasting memories for many.  

Thanks to the generous support of the Edith S. Colliver Fund, the festival showed that there are multiple different ways to interpret the most common practices, such as coffee – freshly made by the Turkish and the Vietnamese hosts, dances – taught by the Romanian, Turkish and Moldavian performers and writing – with traditional calligraphy demonstrated by the Japanese and Iranian hosts. I am convinced that these simple and enjoyable activities expanded the participants’ ideas about how we can all learn from each other’s differences and be entertained doing so!  

I am looking forward to seeing how the International Cultural Festival grows from year to year and hopefully attracts even more culturally curious students and friends of UC Berkeley.  

Written by Natalia Stasik, Program Lead