Hello and welcome back. This past weekend, September 19, 2026, was the Welcoming Scranton celebration hosted by the United Neighborhood Centers of Northeastern Pennsylvania (UNC). Learn more here at unc.org.

Students and faculty representing Marywood University’s Art Therapy program attended this celebration to offer a coloring station. There were wooden flags where people of any age were able to stop by and make a flag using various materials. They were able to create their own flag or they could make the flag to represent their heritage or culture.

This event was truly amazing to experience as an art therapy student. There were tables set up with different things that you could get; jewelry, keychains, food, artworks, handmade crafts, and more! During the event, there was an area that offered the experience of having people (mainly children) do a dance in costumes to a song that represents their culture! It was amazing to watch all the different cultures and groups of similar cultures go up and dance.

I enjoyed seeing different cultural outfits and dances from children of various backgrounds. The whole celebration was to highlight different cultural backgrounds, and it definitely did just that!

Our coloring station had many children visitors from various backgrounds throughout the day. Some made flags representing their culture, some made flags representing themselves or family. The guests created such great variety. I saw these flags as an opportunity to not only share and represent your culture, but to also be proud of where you came from.

Our volunteers from Marywood made some flags of our own too! Some are based on cultural backgrounds, some are representative of the artist, and some represented individual beliefs.

Here are the different flags that we created!

This experience was a great way for Marywood art therapy students to volunteer and interact with people of different ages and cultures. Personally, this opportunity was such a pleasure to be a part of, and I hope that we can do it again next year! If you’re in the Scranton area next year during this celebration, I would recommend you stop by!

That’s all for now, until next time!

~Emma ꨄ︎