Photo courtesy of: Allison HunterAllison Hunter from WOUB will deliver the keynote address on May 3
Ohio University's Kushinda/Ritos de Pasaje celebration, which is sponsored by the Office for Diversity and Inclusion, will occur at 7:30 p.m. Friday, May 3, in Templeton-Blackburn Alumni Memorial Auditorium. A dessert reception will follow in the lobby. The annual ceremony is free and open to the public.
A complement to the spring Graduate and Undergraduate Commencement ceremonies, Kushinda/Ritos de Pasaje is a time for the friends and families of graduates as well as the OHIO community to acknowledge and celebrate the achievements of the class of 2019. This year’s event is expected to honor more than 120 graduates and attract more than 500 attendees.
Allison Hunter, WOUB Public Media editor-in-chief, will deliver the keynote address. The two-time OHIO graduate has created more than 3,000 hours of live broadcasts and managed staff in some of the nation’s busiest newsrooms, including Chicago’s WGN-TV and KTLA in Los Angeles.
During her stellar career, she produced the first newscasts on WXIX in Cincinnati and WOIO in Cleveland. She also worked on an award-winning independent film, commercials and the Emmy-award winning broadcast “Off 63rd,” a Chicago-based public-affairs broadcast.
On April 16, the soon-to-be graduates enjoyed a class mixer in Walter Hall Rotunda where they took a class photo, voted on senior superlatives and viewed a slideshow of photographs from their college careers.
The soon-to-be graduates will have their name and photograph featured in a commemorative souvenir booklet and receive a class photograph, a certificate and a Kente/Serape cloth to put on their graduation gown.
The Kushinda/Ritos de Pasaje celebration was created in 1997 by Director of Multicultural Programs Linda Daniels. It originally started out as two separate programs for African-American students and Latino students, but was combined in 2006 to create one unified multicultural complement to graduation.
The name is derived from several languages. "Kushinda" comes from the east African languages of Dawida and Mwera and means "to overcome" or "to win." The second part of the name, "Ritos de Pasaje," is a Spanish phrase, which means "rites of passage."