International songs, colorful ethnic costumes and dances from all around the globe will be featured this weekend during the fourth annual Families of Ames Celebrate Ethnicities festival.

Downtown Ames will be turned into a place of international culture and community from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday.

“The whole goal is to bring people together and to have a fun and enjoyable day and to learn about the different cultures and to learn about the diversity within the city of Ames,” said Barry Camenisch, co-chairman of FACES.

Attendees will be able to experience other cultures by seeing live entertainment, eating different cultural foods and interacting with people at the different booths.

FACES festival entertainment is free to the public, thanks to donations from Ames businesses.

“We did raise a lot of money from some local organizations and got a matching grant from the Iowa Arts Council,” said Arlin Branhagen, funding chair for FACES.

The entertainment includes many groups performing cultural dances, including the Virsky Ukrainian National Dance Company, which will also be performing Saturday night at Stephens Auditorium.

For the first time in the festival’s history, Nickelodeon will team up with the Boys and Girls Club for its “Kid Zone.”

“The Nickelodeon channel is involved. That’s a biggie to have that, to have them come in and take pictures and want to see what type of games the kids play,” Branhagen said.

The cable channel will film footage for international television at the festival’s Kid Zone for Nickelodeon’s International Day of Play.

“They somehow picked Ames as the place to come,” said Mary Jo Mattila, a member of the Ames Human Relations Committee.

The festival was started in Ames four years ago after the city decided to be proactive about diversity, Mattila said.

“Dialogue groups wanted to have a celebration in the community to celebrate diversity in Ames,” she said. “It started to get people to learn about diversity of different people in the community.”

Camenisch said this festival brings a lot of people from the Ames community together.

“The whole idea behind this is to get people out and to have fun and to be aware of all the different cultures,” he said.

The cultures that Ames residents will be able to sample at FACES will include everything from Caribbean to Vietnamese.

“There are lots of people at Iowa State looking for ways to show their cultural backgrounds and explain it,” Branhagen said, funding chair for FACES. “This is a chance for people to showcase what they’ve got. Everybody is proud of their culture and this gives them an opportunity to share.”