Homies Empowerment is an independent, youth and community development organization born in Oakland, CA. We operated as an after-school program, with weekly homies unity dinners for close to 6 years... now, in year 11 of our operations, we are incubating our dream of becoming a school, called HECHOS, Homies Empowerment Community High School for Oakland's Success!
At the FREEdom Store, all Bay Area residents can shop for FREE(dom) for toiletries and food. We are open every Tuesday from 10-3pm at 7631 MacArthur Blvd. in Oakland, CA. Anyone interested in contacting Homies Empowerment can fill out a form on the website provided.
Homies Empowerment's Care Center houses a dynamic team of folks. At the Care Center our team is dedicated to supporting the community with resources, youth engagement, support and encouragement!
The Care Team is composed of an amazing team of Care Managers. This name comes from our work rooted in assessing, planning, implementing, and evaluating actions required to meet folks health and human services needed. We believe people deserve care and are not just cases as such our staff that serve the community are called Care Managers.
hosts a community closet event every Thursday from 11:00 am to 3:30pm. Community is welcome to visit the Care Center during this time to conduct a general intake with the Care Team or to shop for FREE clothing & other household items.
To donate clothes please email or call/text our team, drop offs for gently used and clean or new clothing and household items are highly encouraged! Drop offs can be made on Fridays from 9:00am-4:00pm.
became a way for rival neighborhoods to cook, share food, hear from community speakers and to build as one larger community. The dinners grew from 20 young people into the 100s. Over time the popularity of those dinners increased. The dinners became so popular that we began to have weekly guests come and visit us including rapper, Immortal Technique, Tarika Lewis, who is the first woman to join the Black Panther Party, and many, many more. The young people at Homies Empowerment didn’t just want to hear from change makers they wanted to make history themselves.
Youth Leadership Program, Adelante The after-school circles began to evolve to include girls groups, boys groups, mental health spaces, and then a partnership was set-up with Arise High School to teach a youth leadership class called Adelante (Moving Forward). The Adelante Leadership Program helped to create a space where young people stepped up to lead in their community. They began to organize fundraising dinners to support undocumented students so that they too could attend college. This marked a turning point for Homies Empowerment where we went from an after-school program to one that would take place during the school day and we began to teach leadership classes along with Raza studies as well. Part of what made the learning dynamic was the constant field trips, 2-3 per month, that Homies Empowerment took to visit places such as SF State University and the studios of KQED. One of our educators, Jay Jasper Pugao would come in to teach young people Pilipino martial arts, Eskrima.