The FREEdom School is a grass-roots community effort seeking to serve 10 students per grade level, in Oakland, CA.
The FREEdom School launched in the Fall of 2023 as a full-fledged independent high school and is now enrolling its second cohort for the 2024-2025 school year.
For the 2024-2025 school year, The FREEdom School will serve 10 9th graders and 10 10th graders. We are now recruiting 10 students for the the new cohort of 9th graders. Please see the application process and APPLY by May 31, 2024.
ADDRESS: 9006 MacArthur Blvd, Oakland, CA 94605
EMAIL: info@homieshighschooltfs.com
PHONE: 510-772-1125
Civil Rights History Trip for FREEdom School
Please click on image if you wish to donate to our GoFundMe account
Homies Empowerment – A Brief History
Homies Empowerment is both an independent, community development organization born in Oakland, CA, and an approach, a way of seeing community through its strengths. We started as a volunteer-run, Jefferson Award winning, after-school program. We then evolved to teach Ethnic Studies and Leadership courses in Oakland schools. We offered weekly “Homies Unity Dinners” across gang lines and civic engagement programs for our first four years of operation. 13 years later, we now operate a free food pantry (FREEdom Store), Care Center, Learning Center, FREEdom library and a half-acre FREEdom Farm.
Our Creation
Our school creation came from the dreams of young people. Imagine a school with grandmothers as both security and wisdom keepers; a place kept small, with 1 adult for every 8 students, in advisories that stay together for 4 years, where every kid is truly known and supported; a school where students take college language classes to truly connect to their home culture in Arabic, Tagalog, Mam and more. A school where kids from the neighborhood have access to a private school, tuition-free. Imagine a place where youth are in real social justice internships that lead to careers.
That place, we call The FREEdom School.
History
THE FREEDOM SCHOOL is both an independent, youth-development organization born in Oakland, CA., and an approach, a way of seeing, gang impacted youth through an asset-based lens. We began as a volunteer-run, Jefferson Award winning, after-school program. We then evolved to teach ethnic studies and leadership courses in Oakland schools. We offered weekly homies unity dinners across gang lines and civic engagement programs for our first four years of operation.
Now, 13 years later, we have evolved to be a community empowerment organization overseeing a learning center, care center and people’s freedom store. Our vision is to go from merely surviving to sustaining ourselves and then thriving here in The Town and beyond. We believe that we have the power to get ourselves free and that begins with a solid, empowering education.