The KUUMBA House

Now in it’s third year, Tremper High School’s, RECOVERY PROJECT, has undertaken what may be it’s biggest challenge and most exciting phase of the project yet!

The KUUMBA House was a neighborhood community center started in 1999 by Nate and Benita Scott. Kuumba is one of the seven Principles of Kwanzaa meaning:

Creativity: To do always as much as we can, in the way we can, in order to leave our community more beautiful and beneficial than we inherited it.

The KUUMBA House served as a youth center, with classes held during the summer months where the neighborhoods children could learn such things as woodcarving, African Dance, slate painting, and other artistic endeavors.

In the winter months, it served as an after school outreach center where students came to work in quiet on homework and get tutoring help from neighborhood adults.

In the fall of 2004, the Entergy Company gave the KUUMBA House a $5,000.00 grant to provide Christmas toys and other goods for the neighborhoods economically deprived children for the 2004 and 2005 Christmas seasons. Nate and Benita found a toy store that was going out of business and were able to purchase enough toys to provide for both years.

The toys were being stored in the KUUMBA House when Hurricane Katrina struck, August 29, 2005. The KUUMBAA House and everything in it were lost to the horrific storm, the building was deemed uninhabitable and torn down in the summer of 2007.

Tremper’s Advanced Marketing and Construction classes have taken on the KUUMBA House as this year’s “Recovery Project”.

We plan to rebuild the center, providing a place for the neighborhood’s children to once again meet for education and social success!