Tempe Will Honor ASU Project Humanities With MLK Diversity Award

TEMPE, AZ — Arizona State University's Project Humanities program will be honored at the city of Tempe's MLK Diversity Awards on Friday.

Project Humanities works to facilitate critical conversations through public programming that engages local, national and international communities in humanities discussions, including through lectures, film screenings and hackathons.

It is one of 11 organizations and individual people receiving an award during Friday's ceremony. All winners were selected by the Tempe Human Relations Commission.

Neal Lester, professor of English at ASU's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and director of Project Humanities, said Project Humanities aims to be intersectional in its pursuits.

“Our approach for the past 10 years has been to see individual identities through multiple lenses of lived experience,” Lester told ASU Now. “Our work is about human ties that bind us all to each other through narrative and storytelling that is both radical and transformative. The community conversations we have are never about telling folks how to think but rather to invite ourselves and each other to think more critically about complicated ideas.”

The ceremony will be held virtually and will feature a speech from Tempe Mayor Corey Woods. It will be broadcast live on the city's Facebook page beginning at 1:30 p.m.

“Congratulations to Project Humanities and all the MLK Diversity Award winners for the exceptional work they do in Tempe,” Woods said in a statement. “Project Humanities offers real tools to teach people how to be more inclusive, compassionate and kind to each other. Programs like this one are vitally important to creating a more equitable community.”

Other recipients include Joseph Delgardo, who has worked to register thousands to vote, the Islamic Community Center and Jazmine Reyes of the Downtown Tempe Authority.