Kwanzaa with ABEP
Here’s wishing you a happy holiday season on behalf of the ABEP Board, staff, and Credit Union Steering Committee! We hope you will be able to include joyous Kwanzaa celebrations with your holiday greetings, activities, feasts, and gatherings this year. If you are interested and/or would like some celebration ideas, visit the National Museum of African American History and Culture as well as the official Kwanzaa website for information.
ABEP consciously incorporates the communal principles highlighted during Kwanzaa into our daily work. It is fitting that we acknowledge Kwanzaa as an opportune time to reflect on how the principles have guided our agenda this past year, and to assess how they will guide us moving into 2022. COVID-19 has helped us realize that Kwanzaa is not just an event or happening. It is intended to be a personal and communal reflective experience that can be celebrated in a variety of ways, not limited to in-person gatherings. We’re taking this opportunity to invite you to engage with us in spirit to preview some of our reflections for this Kwanzaa season.
Wherever you are in our community, join us in honoring our past, particularly the past that informs and inspires our work to create generational and community wealth, and to eliminate those systems that extract wealth from our neighborhoods.
· *We give tribute to—and celebrate—Lucretia Marchbanks, who provides a stellar example of the principle of UJAMAA (Cooperative Economics). She was a popular cook in a Black Hills, South Dakota mining camp during the 1870’s. This was also where she was able to acquire a hotel business and provide backing—from her own funds—for business enterprises of other African Americans in the Black Hills.
· *We give tribute to—and celebrate—Frederick Douglass’ example of UJIMA (Collective Work and Responsibility) for accepting the call to become president of the distressed Freedman’s Bank, the first National African American Bank, in 1874. He also invested thousands of his own dollars to save the bank.
· *We give tribute to—and celebrate—Marcus Garvey as a model of KUJICHAGULIA (Self Determination). He advocated, through his United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), the necessity of Black people to be economically strong and independent. In addition, he founded the Negro Factories Corporation, the Black Star Line, a chain of restaurants and grocery stores, laundries, a hotel, and a printing press.
Wherever you are in our community, join us in contemplating where we are as an organization to assist in developing the economic strength of our neighborhoods and the financial well-being within our families.
· *We appreciate—and celebrate—several Black-led organizations and their leaders who demonstrated the spirit of UMOJA (Unity) by lending direct support to ABEP and putting their trust in us as we rebuilt the organization this year.
Ø We salute Renee Sattiewhite and Denise Huginnie of the African American Credit Union Council (AACUC)
Ø We salute Kenya McKnight Ahad of the Black Women’s Wealth Alliance (BWWA)
Ø We salute Louis King of Summit Academy OIC
Ø We salute D’Angelos Svenkeson of NEOO Partners, Inc.
· *We appreciate—and celebrate—the committed, engaged Minneapolis Northsiders representing different sectors of our community on our Credit Union Steering Committee. They, too, illustrate UMOJA (Unity) as they tend to details that will ensure the success of the credit union initiative.
Wherever you are in our community, join us as we strengthen our resolve and capacity to fulfill ABEP’s mission by methodically advancing toward pre-launching the credit union, becoming a certified Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) and implementing phase one of a family financial empowerment center.
· *We are inspired by—and celebrate—40 Acre Coop and its founder and CEO, Angela Dawson, as clear examples of KUUMBA (Creativity). Using a cooperative structure this organization supports the regaining of Black wealth by emerging Black and other socially disadvantaged farmers.
· *We are inspired by—and celebrate—BlocPower, and its founder and CEO Donnel Baird, whose sense of NIA (Purpose) is impressive. BlocPower’s focus is on building community wealth in underserved communities by retrofitting buildings and residences with green energy, engaging neighbors to do the work, and leveraging the community’s collective bargaining power to negotiate discounted pricing.
· *We are inspired by—and celebrate—Black-led venture capital funds, like Fearless Fund, Harlem Capital, Collab Capital, and more. These are clear examples of NIA (Purpose). Their collective goal is to infuse hundreds of millions of dollars into Black business ventures to help erase the wealth gap and lay a foundation for long-term economic prosperity.
We anticipate that these principles, which we reflect upon during the Kwanzaa season, will reverberate in our work and throughout our community as we continue to collectively build Black economic power.