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CELEBRATION OF CULTURES MISSION:

Celebration of Cultures exists to celebrate and embrace cultural diversity through respecting, understanding, and appreciating the cultures of the Greater Nashville population. 

As facilitators and creators of the Celebration of Cultures, we will:

• Always maintain the integrity of our mission and encourage learning about diverse cultures and traditions.
• Include the local region’s artistic and cultural heritage by offering an opportunity to share gifts and talents specific to that heritage.
• Set standards and policies that maintain inclusiveness of all people.
• Focus on the celebration of: arts, music, food, dance, and traditional representations of culture, by including only vendors, community organizations, and other groups that fit within this focus.
• Facilitate a festival that is always free and family oriented.

CELEBRATION OF CULTURES HISTORY

In 1995 Scarritt-Bennett Center recognized a need within the rapidly growing and changing Nashville community. The population was becoming more diversified and people were in need of ways to understand and appreciate each other ’s differences.  The Celebration of Cultures was established to provide an avenue for different cultures to share their traditions through music, dance, activities, food, and crafts. The popular multi-cultural festival became an annual event held on the Scarritt-Bennett Center campus, attracting 5,000 people from the surrounding neighborhoods each summer.

For the next nine years the festival, which was held at Scarritt-Bennett Center on 19th & Grand every year in July, continued to grow with the needs of the community. After many years, however, the festival become too large for the Scarritt-Bennett Center grounds, and, wanting to truly incorporate the community by providing the event free of charge, Scarritt-Bennett skipped a year to plan a different location, time, and include a new partner, Nashville Metro Parks & Recreation.

On October 6, 2006, 15,000 people from the Nashville area witnessed the rebirth of a new Celebration of Cultures at its new location in Centennial Park. The festival reached out to over 30 cultures and through dance, music, visual arts, a children’s area, and exotic food samplings.  As a community we were introduced to our neighbors. 

Celebration of Cultures continues each year as an annual event that provides a spectacular interaction of our unique diversity and an exciting awareness and education of who we are as a Nashville people.