Umoja means "unity" in Swahili.  An excellent educational experience is a fundamental human right for ALL people, and we are unified in that belief.  One of our values is that children deserve more than a bare bones experience.   A child needs to know how valuable they are and how much they deserve from the very time they learn to open their eyes, and yet, this is a challenge in this immigrant community.  

Because their parents lacked the educational opportunities afforded to folks raised in America, these children are not living in houses with adequate amounts of English proficiency or financial literacy, theoretical or practical.  Some parents need our help just to deposit a check, and they deserve our support and partnership because they are wonderful folks who diligently work in jobs that most middle and upper class folks would never do themselves!

All of this, of course, starts with reading, writing, arithmetic, and homework.  We can tackle all of these thanks to the great libraries in the Richmond area.  We tackle these basics about 4 days per week.

Our parents and their children deserve to have the same sort of experience that the kids in the private schools get, but we can't currently afford that.    So for now, we are doing our best to ensure these kids get to eat at the same places their middle class peers eat, shop at the same stores where their public school friends shop, and aspire to the attend ANY higher educational institution they feel is worth of their matriculation.

As I tell them all the time, once they attend an Ivy, then they can start to buy real Gucci like I once did.  But for now, it is mostly chains.  We eat inside where the kids learn and practice how to order food and pay for it.  They also get to feel like they are just as valuable as the other kids who get to do this, and they will work harder to ensure they can do it more in their own lives after they earn a college degree.

Weekly Lessons