Small kaleidoscopes symbolizing the focus of Salt Lake City's newly renamed Office of Diversity were distributed to a multicultural crowd that gathered Thursday morning at Washington Square.

"If you look at something through a kaleidoscope, it's beautiful — no matter its color, shape or size," Mayor Rocky Anderson said. "All of our city's residents are worthy of respect and appreciation, no matter their color or shape, no matter their ethnic or religious background, physical abilities, genders or sexual orientations."

The Kaleidoscope program, designed to help increase understanding of the city's diverse communities, is the city's latest effort to promote and celebrate its diversity. It's also the first undertaking of the Office of Diversity, which until this week was known as the Office of Minority Affairs.

Josie Valdez, who was hired this past December to lead the Office of Minority Affairs, said the new moniker more accurately reflects what the city is trying to accomplish.

"Minority," she said, is an outdated and sometimes negative term, and the "affairs" part isn't all that positive, either.

"If I were having an affair, I wouldn't want anyone to know," Valdez quipped.

The goal of the Kaleidoscope program is all about celebrating diversity, she said, and the name change is part of what Valdez calls a "positive-imaging" process.

"This is the day when we begin anew to build a place for us, as diverse citizens of Salt Lake City, bringing together the beautiful colors, the beautiful differences to strengthen the foundation that has been laid," she said.

Anderson said the key component of the Kaleidoscope program is leadership training for members of Salt Lake City's diverse community. A speakers bureau is being developed in which diverse community leaders will visit schools and serve as role models, he said.

The city also has printed 7,000 copies of its "Good Neighbors Partnership Resource Guide," written in both English and Spanish, containing information about city and community resources and explanations of city ordinances that frequently are subjects of neighborhood tensions.

Salt Lake City's Latino population has nearly doubled from 1990 to 2000, Anderson said, making up nearly 19 percent of city residents.

The Salt Lake City School District also demonstrates the city's diversity, the mayor said, with students from ethnic communities making up 53 percent of enrollment.

"As mayor, I am delighted to see this growth of diversity in our community," Anderson said. "The members of our diverse community who reside in Salt Lake City make us far more culturally rich and add to the vitality of our neighborhoods, stores and places of work. (Diversity) helps enrich the lives of every single one of us."

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