Concord Multicultural Festival celebrates the community
Concord will hold its annual Multicultural Festival on Sunday, Sept. 20, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. in Keach Park, on Newton Avenue.
“It’s an annual festival with food and music and art and activities and community,” said organizer Jessica Livingston. “We come together every year to celebrate all of the different cultures [in the Concord community]. And when I say all, I mean all of the different cultures, not just the newer ones. We come together to celebrate everybody’s culture and share with each other through everybody’s favorite universal things: food, music and art.”
Livingston said one of the throughlines of the Festival, something that ties everything together, is the music.
“We have a whole lineup of music, like we always do,” she said, “but it changes. Sindy [Chown], our performance coordinator, is really great at keeping all of the favorites while also bringing in new types of performances. We get access to all different types of music and performances and dance from all over the world.”
For many festivalgoers the main draw is the food.
“We have commercial food vendors, food trucks, like most festivals do,” Livingston said, “but we also open [the festival] up to community members to share their food and sell their food.” She said that by partnering with the New Hampshire Food Bank, the Festival makes it fairly straightforward for community cooks to sell their food and still meet food licensing and safety regulations. “Our community cooks will go down there [to the New Hampshire Food Bank commercial kitchen] and cook and prep all of their food. It’s this big production that everybody loves. The cooks get to work in this great beautiful state-of-the-art commercial kitchen and work with the cooks from the Food Bank. There are chefs there, but then there’s also people working and training for some of their culinary programs. It’s a great experience for everybody, including the volunteers. I had a volunteer tell me one year that we should start charging for experience. It’s like a VIP kind of access to how food is made, but also you get to try the foods before they’re served.”
“We have a lot of community cooks this year,” Livingstone continued, “which is wonderful. We have a Jamaican food vendor this year; we’ve never had Jamaican food there before, other than some of the vendors do sort of Caribbean-style food, but this person is from Jamaica. We have the usual Nepali favorites like samosas [South Asian fried dumplings] and the roti [a laminated Indian flat bread]. And we have food from the Middle East and just a whole array of different types of food. People are definitely going to want to come with an appetite.”
Livingstone said that this year, even more than in previous years, the arts will play a big role in the Multicultural Festival.
“One sad thing,” she said, “is that we used to have the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts work with us and, as you know, [that agency] has all but closed, which is very sad for the whole state for so many reasons. But it was always great to work with them, because they were able to sponsor some of the traditional artists who continue to practice traditional crafts and making, like basket weaving and things like that. We have artists who will come and sell their work. We have, of course, [Iraqi painter] Saad Hindal, who is a gem in our community. He will be selling his paintings. We also have other artist-vendors who will be selling their handmade products — either handmade, specific cultural products or immigrant-owned creative businesses.”
Concord Multicultural Festival
When: Sunday, Sept. 20, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Where: Keach Park in Concord Heights
More: concordnhmulticulturalfestival.org
Featured photo: Multicultural Festival. Courtesy photo.