Harambee Ujima Next 50

We are promoting the health and care of the community to achieve WELL-being. 

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Harambee Black Arts Festival.  We are raising investment to launch the 51st year.

We aim to honor our motto “Breathing Life into the Community” by continuing in our Kenyan tradition of pulling together and bringing the best of what we have to the festival. The efforts put forth into this festival are done willingly; with an all-volunteer board, donations, grants, and various funding techniques and we need YOU to join our community to make sure Harambee is celebrated. 

Your sponsorship will be used to fund artist exhibitions, cultural performances, festival operations and marketing materials for the Harambee Black Arts Festival. Your contribution gives not only funding to much needed factors of the festival, it enables us to give those who rely on their craft to survive a market where they are accepted and appreciated. Your contribution is your invite into much more than a festival; it invites you to make a difference in a world you may not be aware existed.

Any donation is needed and respected.  If you're not able to donate, you can still contribute. Please spread our message to your networks so the Spirit of Harambee may reach further than it has before. This is the time for Black Arts to be appreciated, reciprocated, and distributed among the general public. 

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In 2010 The Harambee Ujima Association formed an economic justice consortium with Diversity FOOTprint Project. (The Thomas Merton Center serves as its IRS-Fiscal Agent).  The consortium reconvened the historical Harambee Black Arts Festival, promoted with an innovative concept called an Art Social Economic Generator (A+SEG) designed to expand trade. The mission is to create an economic base for arts to expand the diversity of culture in the Pittsburgh region honoring the spirit, integrity and unity of all people.

The first phase of building the A+SEG prototype engine has been completed within the past three years. With Government support we pulled together not to make profit, but created an environment where profit can be made (investing life in many places) by local and regional artists and to emerge local vendors to separate the Black Diaspora communities from political power and racism.  The challenge for the next two years is to increase social capital for the association, businesses/entrepreneurs, and the community through the Harambee Ujima Black Arts Festival.

We aim to use the festival as a celebration of the Harambee Legacy; advancing the Black Arts to the masses in and around Pittsburgh by producing an annual community-based buy and sell event. In short, we are constructing a new trade market right in our own neighborhoods that can be reached by those who are underprivileged and disenfranchised, where they can become self-supporting while supporting their community at the same time.

This is what the Harambee Legacy is based around.

The Harambee Ujima Black Arts and Culture Association is a cultural collaboration that advocates and advances the Black Arts Movement in order to preserve all forms of Black Art in the greater Pittsburgh region. We not only do this for our own interest, but for the future generations that will come about in Black diaspora communities. We work to give the underemployed and unemployed ample opportunity to develop skills and utilize talents to enter the marketplace. Going forward, we want to see the association and the Black Arts Movement in Pittsburgh grow, hand-in-hand. We want people to recognize our logo, our artists, our voices and our message.

We want people to understand that Black Art is Appreciated, Black Art is Beautiful, Black Art is Profitable, and Black Art is Art.

Join our movement and live the Spirit of Harambee.

The start of the Harambee Ujima Black Arts and Culture Association began in 1967 under the name Together Inc. Honoring the Swahili language, the incorporation used the words “Harambee” – The Kenyan tradition of community self-help translating to “all pull together” and “Ujima” – The third of the seven principles of Kwanzaa meaning collective work and responsibility, to introduce the concept of coming together to protest the mistreatment of African Americans in that era. The start of the Harambee Black Arts festival focused on using Black Power dialogue, visual art, music, and Black Spirituality to being bring harmony, morality, and rising consciousness to Pittsburgh and the rest of America. At its peak, the festival was the largest of its kind in Pittsburgh and 3rd largest in all of the United States.

In 2001, after years of fractured relations and Together Inc. disbanding, it rose from the ashes and transformed into The Harambee Ujima Black Arts and Culture Association. The association has pushed against many obstacles since its reinstatement to bring the festival back to its glory days. It is with great pleasure that we are able to celebrate the 50th anniversary this year and to say we have made it!