About Homies Empowerment
Community based
At Homies Empowerment, our work for freedom is rooted in Revolutionary Love, Sacred Identities, Putting In Work, and Self-Determination. Through empowering education, community cultivation, food justice, and cooperative economics, we work alongside our community towards a world absent of whiteness, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy. We are seeking to create a world where our freedom is connected to our neighbor’s freedom.
A successful movement depends on solidarity being more than an abstraction printed on plaques or in mission statements and extolled in songs at the end of meetings. Solidarity, practical and concrete, is at the core of unionism and collective power; it is critical to the success of struggles to improve the lives of working people. To us solidarity means standing alongside each other, being honest, not hurting each other, and when we do, repairing that harm. It means backing each other up. It means that we continually work on ourselves to be the best version of ourselves for ourselves and for our community. The idea of solidarity for us is critically important. It guides every step that we take. We think about how our thoughts and our actions will impact others and we are critically aware and not just of our intent but also of our impact.
History
Homies Empowerment was born in 2009 as a way of supporting and seeing young people and our community through a positive lens. At the time, co-founders Lizbeth Gomez and Cesar A. Cruz both worked at a continuation school and they wanted to see young people treated in a different way, instead of being received by barbed wire and having their backpacks searched for drugs and weapons on a daily basis. They dreamed about doing something different for and with young people. At that time, there was a war between two rival gangs and neighborhoods in Oakland, CA which were at an all-time high, and their work was to bring young people together while collectively learning their history, and finding ways to work together to create a better Oakland. To bring these young people together, efforts were made to host after-school circles, classes and dinner. Thus the rivals were brought together to break bread and eat dinner together. But that decision took over a year to cultivate. As an organization we set up a partnership with the Urban Services YMCA and they allowed us to use the Eastlake YMCA building located on 45th Ave in East Oakland for us to meet up. We began having dinner together every Wednesday night in what later would become known as Homies Dinners.
Homies Empowerment operated as a grassroots after-school program from 2009 until 2014. During this time various community members and Homies board members continued the work to help Homies Empowerment grow, and provide youth with the resources to grow individually and as a community. The program went on a hiatus for a few years as co-founder Cesar Cruz went to Harvard University to pursue his doctorate in 2013. The doctorate was centered on supporting youth on the margins.
2017- Present
In 2017, forty alumni from Homies Empowerment gathered to reconnect and to dream up a way to take the visions of Homies Empowerment to the next level. Young adults began to dream about how we create our own high school.
Out of that session came the development of the school design team which included Mercedes Flores-Casiano, Omar Escalante, Dr. G Reyes, Ventura Flores and Dr. Cesar Cruz. Then we were able to hire for the first time Rubi Pelayo and Nathalie Carvajal to join the design team. That team has been working extremely hard to continue the design of the school. The school will be named, The FREEdom School, of Homies Empowerment. Its mission is to support the development of the Warrior, Scholar, Healer and Hustler within every person in their own process of individual and community emancipation.
At Homies Empowerment, our work for freedom is rooted in Revolutionary Love, Sacred Identities, Putting In Work, and Self-Determination. Through empowering education, community cultivation, food justice, and cooperative economics, we work alongside our community towards a world absent of whiteness, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy. We are seeking to create a world where our freedom is connected to our neighbor’s freedom.
A successful movement depends on solidarity being more than an abstraction printed on plaques or in mission statements and extolled in songs at the end of meetings. Solidarity, practical and concrete, is at the core of unionism and collective power; it is critical to the success of struggles to improve the lives of working people. To us solidarity means standing alongside each other, being honest, not hurting each other, and when we do, repairing that harm. It means backing each other up. It means that we continually work on ourselves to be the best version of ourselves for ourselves and for our community. The idea of solidarity for us is critically important. It guides every step that we take. We think about how our thoughts and our actions will impact others and we are critically aware and not just of our intent but also of our impact.
History
Homies Empowerment was born in 2009 as a way of supporting and seeing young people and our community through a positive lens. At the time, co-founders Lizbeth Gomez and Cesar A. Cruz both worked at a continuation school and they wanted to see young people treated in a different way, instead of being received by barbed wire and having their backpacks searched for drugs and weapons on a daily basis. They dreamed about doing something different for and with young people. At that time, there was a war between two rival gangs and neighborhoods in Oakland, CA which were at an all-time high, and their work was to bring young people together while collectively learning their history, and finding ways to work together to create a better Oakland. To bring these young people together, efforts were made to host after-school circles, classes and dinner. Thus the rivals were brought together to break bread and eat dinner together. But that decision took over a year to cultivate. As an organization we set up a partnership with the Urban Services YMCA and they allowed us to use the Eastlake YMCA building located on 45th Ave in East Oakland for us to meet up. We began having dinner together every Wednesday night in what later would become known as Homies Dinners.
Homies Empowerment operated as a grassroots after-school program from 2009 until 2014. During this time various community members and Homies board members continued the work to help Homies Empowerment grow, and provide youth with the resources to grow individually and as a community. The program went on a hiatus for a few years as co-founder Cesar Cruz went to Harvard University to pursue his doctorate in 2013. The doctorate was centered on supporting youth on the margins.
2017- Present
In 2017, forty alumni from Homies Empowerment gathered to reconnect and to dream up a way to take the visions of Homies Empowerment to the next level. Young adults began to dream about how we create our own high school.
Out of that session came the development of the school design team which included Mercedes Flores-Casiano, Omar Escalante, Dr. G Reyes, Ventura Flores and Dr. Cesar Cruz. Then we were able to hire for the first time Rubi Pelayo and Nathalie Carvajal to join the design team. That team has been working extremely hard to continue the design of the school. The school will be named, The FREEdom School, of Homies Empowerment. Its mission is to support the development of the Warrior, Scholar, Healer and Hustler within every person in their own process of individual and community emancipation.