On June 19, Scottsdale’s first-ever “Juneteenth” celebration took place at El Dorado Park with the help of a Facebook post by one resident.

Indica Rivers, a long-time Scottsdale resident, observed that her community had lacked a proper Juneteenth event. Juneteenth is widely celebrated as the day emancipation reached all slaves in the United States.

With the help of her advocacy group GenerationBLK and another organization, Operation Change, they were able to rally together and put together a festival in a little less three weeks.

“Everyone’s been waiting for something like this to happen and we haven’t had a large event like this in years,” Ms. Rivers said.

With the recent protests calling for racial equality, she thought it was time for some kind of action to be taken towards tackling that issue. After issuing a statement via Facebook about the plan for holding a Juneteenth celebration, the event really began to gain traction. Partnering with Operation Change, they planned the whole event with much success.

GenerationBLK was recently nominated for a citizen’s award by the Scottsdale Police Department for its recent initiatives in the community.

“Literally all the planning we’ve all ever done was probably our kids’ birthday parties,” Ms. Rivers commented.

Despite the need for a lot of quick planning to be done, Ms. Rivers and those that she worked with were able to host a successful event celebrating the Juneteenth holiday. Over 500 people we able to attend the outdoor event, which was run with proper social distancing practices. After seeing the success with Juneteenth this year, she is hopeful for what they could do for a Juneteenth celebration next year.

“What we plan on doing is trying to get it at different locations throughout the Valley just to bring people out of their comfort zone because we have so many beautiful sights [in the valley],” Ms. Rivers said.

This year’s festival was hosted at El Dorado Park in Scottsdale and brought people together with food and activities. While there were many planned activities for families and children there was also an opportunity run by Operation Change providing some helpful tools to attendees. According to Corey Wallace, one of the organizers with Operation Change, they wanted to help bring some needed positivity to the community.

“[Some] people still don’t really know what Juneteenth is and how important it is to the community and how much of a tradition it is nationwide,” Mr. Wallace said.

Operation Change ran a voter registration table that also helped with connecting former felons with job opportunities. As part of their voter registration, they offered some education on the subject matter.

Speakers were also invited to speak on the topics of mental health and history.

“A lot of people are just happy that we’re doing something positive,” Mr. Wallace said. “You know, there’s a lot of negativity going around in the country.”

Education issues like this were one of the main topics of interest that Operation Change was promoting at their booth alongside that, they were able to reach a large audience of unregistered eligible voters.

Ken Countryman, a supporter of this event, worked with the group to help with voter registrations and educational outreach at the celebration. According to him, they were able to register several hundred voters.

“It’s an important election so we wanted to make sure people could get registered and due to the pandemic, we wanted to do it early enough where they can mail in their ballots,” Mr. Countryman said.

Mr. Countryman considers himself to be politically “conscious” and finds value in helping to inform his community about these issues in this important election season that is approaching. Events like the Juneteenth gathering are a great way of helping to educate communities.

“I mean social justice is the forefront right now [so] we are really trying to effectuate some change and there was a really high interest in coming together,” he said.

Having an impact and spreading “woke” messages is something he feels is helped by events like Juneteenth. With the recent uproar against police brutality in the country, an event that celebrated black people was something needed by the community to add some positivity while also providing important educational opportunities.

“What that means is being involved and having an impact so I think that’s the main purpose of doing events like that,” Mr. Countryman said.

Editor’s Note: Caroline Yu is a student-journalist at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism serving in a paid internship role at Independent Newsmedia.