Everyone is invited to come to the Austin Urban Market to support local businesses. Your support is key to the continued success of local business owners. Let's all start "Doing It The Ujamaa Way". Win in free drawings for "$5 Ujamaa Buck"** that can be used to purchase products and services at the event. 

What is Ujamaa?

Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics) The fourth principle in Kwanzaa – “To BUILD AND MAINTAIN our own stores, shops and other businesses and to profit from them TOGETHER.” In other words, BAM Together!!!!

An excerpt from Black Families by Harriette Pipes McAdoo:

Ujamaa stresses self-reliance in the building, strengthening, and controlling of the economics of our own community. Ujamaa means “first and foremost…that for our development we have to depend upon ourselves and our own resources.”  The assumption here is that we must seize and maintain the initiative in all that is ours, and that we must harness our resources and put them to the best possible use in the service of the community.  This does not mean denying all assistance from or that we not work with others, but it does mean controlling policy and shouldering the essential responsibility for our own future. Ujamaa emphasizes the essentiality of work to the well-being and development of persons, family, and community.  It also focuses on working together to achieve what we need and want for both the personal and collective good.  Working together means not only that we increase our productive capacity but also that we strengthen our claim to sharing what we produce.  Ujamaa also stress on an obligation of generosity, especially to the poor and vulnerable.

Throughout the sacred teachings of ancient Egypt in particular and Africa in general, the ethic of care and responsibility is expressed in the concept of shared social wealth and service to the most disadvantaged.  This moral concept finds it modern philosophical expression in our social thought and struggles, as a people  and for social justice.  And this struggle is not simply to be generous to the poor and vulnerable but ultimately to end their poverty and vulnerability, so that they too can live a decent, undeprived, and meaningful life.  For only in such a context will they be able to pursue the truly human without the limitation imposed by poverty, deprivation, or the debilitating struggle for just life’s basic necessities.  To share wealth and work, then to share concern, care, and responsibility for a new, more human and fulfilling future.

For more information contact: Don @ (512) 785-7045 or email: austinurbanmarket@gmail.com.

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