North Wales MS Mark Isherwood will sponsor and speak at NWAMI’s (Networking for World Awareness of Multicultural Integration) Senedd event this evening celebrating ‘Multicultural Integration and the Role of Welsh Culture’.
Mr Isherwood is President of North Wales based NWAMI, which promotes Community Cohesion and Social Integration through education and cultural engagement globally and aims to reduce hate crime throughout society by building tolerance and understanding, along with a mutual respect for diverse culture for all.
At this evening’s event there will be two hours of cultural activities and presentations including exhilarating music and dance performances.
Mr Isherwood said:
“Over the last eleven years, NWAMI has worked extremely hard to raise awareness of Diversity and Multiculturism. Their members come from diverse ethnic and social backgrounds.
“In 2013 NWAMI organised a Multicultural event at Bangor University, hosted by the University and funded by Bangor City Council, Gwynedd County Council, Arts Council Wales and Big Lottery, with invited speakers and performers from around the UK and beyond, encouraging participants to introduce a similar multicultural ethos in their own organisations.
“NWAMI has also held events in the Houses of Parliament, Temple of Peace in Cardiff and here in the Senedd for the same purpose.
“Whilst NWAMI is their registered name, their operational name is the Centre for Cultural Engagement.”
Speaking at this evening’s event, Mr Isherwood will state:
“As Chair and Founder of NWAMI, Dr Sibani Roy has previously stated: ‘Some of the people think that when you talk about integration, you mean assimilation. We have to explain to people that integration is not assimilation’.
“To achieve this we need to promote an understanding and respect of this country’s diverse cultures through cultural engagement and interaction, education and training. We need to build a cohesive community and integrated society in Wales in the 21st century.
“As the Cambridge Dictionary states, Integration is ‘the action or process of successfully joining or mixing with a different group of people’.
Integration is also sometimes referred as a multicultural concept that denotes the removal of barriers that segregate human beings, where integration can only happen when tolerance in the form of mutual respect and acceptance occurs on the part of racially and ethnically different groups of human beings - accepting, recognizing, valuing and celebrating as well as giving equal rights for participation.
“As I have said many times, this is about celebrating our glorious diversity together.”