Homies Empowerment

Dr. César Cruz , Co-Founder

EERI

Homies community - Cesar Cruz

Through empowering education, community cultivation, food justice, and cooperative economics, Homies Empowerment works alongside their community towards a world absent of whiteness, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy. Homies Empowerment seeks to create a world where our freedom is connected to our neighbor’s freedom.

Homies Empowerment is an independent, grassroots community-based organization out of East Oakland. They started as a volunteer-run, Jefferson Award winning, after-school program taking on an approach and a way of seeing gang-impacted youth through an asset-based lens. To provide spaces where youth can heal, thrive and self-actualize, Homies Empowerment mirrors the positive assets that attract young people to gangs: a sense of belonging, protection, rites of passage, and meeting basic needs. Their after-school program evolved to full-fledged Ethnic Studies and Leadership courses offered throughout Oakland schools.

Currently, in addition to run their own high school, The FREEdom School, Homies is operating their Community Care Center, Learning Center, and several food access programs out of their FREEdom Store: Tuesday food distribution, Love Packages, and Loaves and Fishes.

Homies Empowerment was born in 2009 as a way of supporting and seeing young people and their community through a positive lens. For their first four years of operation, Homies created a safe space during their weekly Homies Dinners where youth from across gang lines sat together to break bread and came together to participate in youth-led civic engagement programs. As a response to their desire for more spaces like Homies, their team began developing the Freedom High School, a community school for youth who have been pushed out of traditional schools.

Homies Empowerment Cesar Cruz - Cesar Cruz

Dr. César Cruz

Co-Founder

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