The multicultural club is focused on having a space for students who don’t feel any cultural connection in their environment. They are students who have concerns and want to see improvements in their school environment to accommodate all people.

“How do we support students that are feeling lost or maybe not feeling connected to the school, to the building based on any cultural experience or based on the lack of cultural experience? Says club advisor Laramie Amezquita, “and so that kind of started a multicultural club.”

It’s been a struggle for some clubs to come back to their first year back from online learning, but the multicultural club still has work to be done. Members of the club would participate in meetings to discuss how to change the culture of CKHS to be more open for all students. Currently the club has a website that is constantly updated for the school where students and staff could be informed about verbiage or behavior that needs to be addressed and changed for the sake of everyone.

“And so that’s something that we’re still working on now,” says Amezquita. “It’s going to be an open-ended project. We’re never going to be finished because there’s always going to be an update. There’s always going to be new information or a new identification to make sure that we’re sharing and included in that.”

With the work that the multicultural club has done and is continuing to do since its conception, it opened an avenue for more clubs to come about. More clubs to speak up on specific cultural topics and issues, creating safe spaces for all people.

“I do think that the multicultural club has been the beginning of helping kind of find a different avenue when it comes to understanding.” said Amezquita, “We got to be one of the pioneers to kind of start and spread out, and give that support to other club’s starts.”

For the month of November, the multicultural club had no specific plans for Native American Heritage Month. That is because there already is a club dedicated to Native American Culture, but the Native American club is more so exclusive only to those of the respective culture due to the desire to remain private.

“Native club is a lot more private, and not always exclusive to the population.” says Amezquita, “It’s more of a private Google classroom forum. We’re having a club meeting and to make sure that there’s a comfort level and safety level, that’s not out in the public, but yet at the same time, we want there to be identification, you know, posters and different works of art and different accepted acknowledgement of our native culture.”

The multicultural club’s mission is to build a safe and comforting space for everyone at Central Kitsap High School where people can share and celebrate each other’s cultures. For Native American Heritage Month, the Native American club is a space for Native American students who need a place away from the public to privately share their cultural experiences with one another.