City of Dickinson and Bakken Center to host Diversity Picnic

The city of Dickinson and the non-profit Bakken Center have partnered up to host the first Dickinson Diversity Picnic next Sunday from 3 to 7 p.m. at the recreation center.
The event aims to bring together the city’s increasingly diverse residents, whether they’ve been here decades or just days.
“It’s an ice breaker, you know,” Bakken Center executive director Emmanuel Ezeh said. “Everybody’s welcome, every initiative is welcome, all organizations are welcome.”
Ezeh, whom The Press profiled in January, came to Dickinson about a year ago from Los Angeles, so he knows what it’s like to be the new guy in town.
Right away he noticed that he wasn’t the only out-of-towner: People were arriving from out of state, even from out of the country, every day.
Ezeh, originally from Nigeria, started the Bakken Center, then known as the Afro Bakken Center, as a way to reach out to not only fellow African immigrants, but to newcomers of all ethnicities and backgrounds who “are not aware of how to work the system,” he said.
But he still wanted a way to address the slowly changing population in Dickinson and surrounding Stark County. By 2015, it’s estimated that 96 percent of the population will be white, 1.6 percent Native American and almost 2 percent Hispanic.
That’s where the idea of the picnic came in; Ezeh has been working to organize it for much of the past year.
“There has never been a forum created specifically for such an event,” he said. “So the idea is for everybody to come there...to see the different groups of people in terms of ethnicity, in terms of cultural difference, in terms of economic difference. We’re celebrating our differences.”
“Our community is undergoing a change the magnitude of which not experienced before,” City Administrator Shawn Kessel said in a statement announcing the picnic. “New people bring diversity of thought to the community and serve to further enrich the quality of life we experience.”
Ezeh said he understands that not everyone likes to see Dickinson change.
“When you have so much changing, happening so fast, it has to be attended to,” he said.
Ezeh said he wanted to provide a chance for people to meet and mingle in a relaxed environment. The free event features planned demonstrations from the Dickinson Police and Fire Departments, as well as food and music.
“Something like this, people get to come out and really get to meet people from elsewhere, talk to them maybe see their type of food or drinks,” he said. “I think that can, it sets the tone for people to relax a bit.
“We’re trying to soften the differences, you know,” he said.
The picnic is just the first of future initiatives to highlight diversity in Dickinson, which Ezeh said is “only going to increase.”
“(Dickinson) is never going to be the same anymore,” he said. “We’re working toward insuring that the changes are on a positive note.”