Here’s hoping the weather cooperates for the Diversity Matters Festival scheduled Sunday from 3-7 p.m. at Red Rock Park on Lynn Shore Drive.
Hosted by the North Shore Juneteenth Association with help from the state Department of Conservation and Recreation, Save the Harbor/Save the Bay, and the Essex County Community Foundation, the festival offers all of us a few hours of joy and celebration that have been in short supply for 15 months.
The event will feature music, dance performances, food, and vendors, with opportunities for entrepreneurs, artists, and other creative people to show off their work and forge bonds with other community members.
With one of Lynn’s most beautiful vistas serving as a backdrop, festival attendees will help celebrate ways Lynn has brought people together instead of dividing them, and enjoy the city’s vast range of talent and innovation.
“It’s time we had an event like this that celebrates and showcases our cultural wealth and the amazing diversity of this city,” Lynn Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Officer Faustina Cuevas said last week.
The festival is well-timed, with preliminary U.S. Census data released last week outlining how diverse Lynn really is. Latinos now make up 44 percent of Lynn’s population, representing the largest demographic shift in the city between 2010 and 2020.
The city’s population grew 12 percent to cross the 100,000-resident mark. By some estimates, that number is low when Census undercounts, exacerbated by pandemic-driven social distancing in 2020, are taken into consideration.
There is no question Lynn is a diverse city and its public-school system is a miniature United Nations with languages from around the world spoken in local schools. The city’s history as a refuge in the true spirit of the Statue of Liberty is easily documented with Russian Jews, Southeast Asians, Sudanese and Bosnian refugees ― to name just a few ― finding new homes in Lynn in the last 40 years.
In as much as the Diversity Matters Festival is an opportunity for fun and goodwill on one of summer’s last weekend, the gathering is also an opportunity to look forward to the upcoming city elections and beyond and ask how Lynn can harness its diverse population to make the city an even brighter beacon for our nation’s greatest values ― freedom and equality.
