About Cross Cultural Programs

The Forum’s Cross Cultural Programs bring people with different backgrounds together to deepen their understanding of others and themselves.

Programs range from hour-long workshops to year-long cohorts and incorporate self reflection, facilitated conversations, and immersions in Alaskan communities. We work with local culture bearers, elders, and community members to more fully appreciate the diversity of the communities where we live and work.

"[This immersion] showed how everyone has different customs, even though some of the places they're from aren't far from mine.”

Youth participant after participating in an Ilakucaraq immersion
 

Cross Cultural Programs are guided by these principles:

1) Every person has a culture.

2) We have to understand our own cultures in order to understand other cultures.

3) Cultures are complex and can’t be represented by a single story.

4) Cultural awareness is a practice, not an achievement.

5) We only see what we’re attentive to, and the work of cross-cultural programs is to broaden what we pay attention to.

6) Building a resilient cultural identity is necessary for engaging in cross-cultural work.
 

“It helped me understand more of my students’ culture. I will continue to love and embrace their whole being as a person.”

Educator after participating in North Slope C3 program

Learn more about our current cross cultural programs:
C3 Skin Sewing

C3: Creating Cultural Competence supports aware, compassionate, and resilient cultural identity for professionals. This work provides a strong foundation upon which community connection and culturally-responsive professional practices can be built.

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Alaska Humanities Forum

The Alaska Humanities Forum is a non-profit, non-partisan organization that designs and facilitates experiences to bridge distance and difference – programming that shares and preserves the stories of people and places across our vast state, and explores what it means to be Alaskan.

Alaska Humanities Forum
 
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