Seven Principles of Kwanzaa: Guiding Values for Building and Maintaining Healthy and Thriving Families and Communities
The Seven Principles
The Seven Principles are the foundation and essential reason for celebrating the holiday. Kwanzaa was created to introduce seven guiding principles for building and restoring healthy and nurturing families and strong and supportive communities. The core meaning of each principle is presented along with an explanation of the principle, followed by suggestions on how to use the principle as part of the Kwanzaa observance. From the outset we want to stress that the daily family and school plans are mere suggestions or guides. Each family or classroom may chose to add, subtract or modify the Plans. The daily plans are meant to give you an idea of what is possible, not impose our own conception or approach.
Principle 1. Togetherness & Harmony
Unity/Umoja: To strive for and maintain unity in the family, neighborhood and the larger community.
Explanation
The Umoja principle instructs that each member of the family and by extension the community is constituted by a web of interpersonal relationships. The health and possibilities of the family and community is therefore dependent upon the quality of relationship within the family and community.
Instruction: As a family or classroom discuss the problems and possibilities of building and fostering unity in your family, class, school, or community.
Principle 2. Self-Initiative and Self-Efficacy
Self-Determination/Kujichagulia: To define ourselves, to name ourselves, speak for ourselves and create for ourselves.
Explanation
The Kujichagulia principle says African Americans need defined and practice their own cultural values, celebrate their heroes and heroines, and contribute in their own way to bettering themselves, their communities and institutions, the nation and the world. The essence of self-determination is freedom.
Instruction: Explain and discuss the importance of practicing the self-determination value.
Principle 3. Accountability & Reliability
Collective Work and Responsibility/Ujima: To build and maintain our community together and make our sister’s and brother’s problems our problems and solve them together.
Explanation
The Ujima principle teaches each family member to recognize that their own well-being is derived from their family’s and community’s well being and that they must be concern with the overall health of their family and community; and that the lives of each family member and that of the community are bound together, and that the success of any one their lives is an aspect of and dependent on the goodness and health of the community as a whole; and that finally, there can be no private accounting of the success or failure of their individual lives one by one. The community and the families which make up the community are responsible for the success and failure of the community in its totality.
Instruction: Explain and discuss the critical role collective work and responsibility plays in developing strong, safe and productive families and communities.
Principle 4. Shared Wealth
Cooperative Economic/Ujamaa: To build and maintain our own stores, shops and other businesses and profit from them together.
Explanation
The Ujamaa principle empowers families to come together around their collective economic interest and to see their economic strength in sharing resources and cooperative investing, buying, and selling. Moreover, the moral ties necessary to achieve and practice the Ujamaa principle obligate those who live in the community to support, care for and look out for each other and to see the interest of the each person as tied to the interest of the family and community. In a word, wealth and resources should be shared.
Instruction: Explain and discuss the possibility cooperative economic can have in your family or community and how this cooperative economic can strengthen your community.
Principle 5. Service and Mission-Driven
Purpose/Nia: To make our collective vocation the building and developing of our community in order to restore our people to their traditional greatness.
Explanation
The Nia principle asks each person to be services or mission-driven on the behalf of their family, school, and community. The core concept and practice of the value Purpose is service. Service to others, family school, community and the nation is what defines who we are and our possibilities for developing communities that provide the context for families and children to thrive and flourish. Each member of the family, school, or community is asked to examine his/her skills or talents and determine how he/she will put forth those skills or talents in the service of the family, school, or community.
Instruction: Explain and discuss how increased family and community service can be of benefit to your family and community.
Principle 6. Continuous Improvement
Creativity/Kuumba: To do always as much as we can in the way we can in order to leave our family and community more beautiful and beneficial than when we inherited it.
Explanation
The Kuumba principle demands continuous improvement both at the personal and family level. This principle pushes families and communities, adults and youth, not to be satisfied with “just getting by”, with not being satisfied with being average or even above average. George Washington Carver, acclaimed scientist, teaches us all that: “No one has a right to come in to the world without leaving behind a distinct and legitimate reason for having passed though it.”
Instruction: Explain and discuss how practice of this Kwanzaa value can help you attain your highest potential.
Principle 7. Hope and confidence
Faith/Imani: To believe with all our heart in our people, our parents, our teachers, our leaders.
Explanation
The Imani principle teaches us to have confidence in ourselves, parents, teachers and leaders and community. Mary McLeod Bethune, noted educator and ambassador says: “Without faith nothing is possible; with faith nothing is impossible. Faith empowers us to see beyond the immediate. Philosopher Howard Thurman asserts: “Faith is the substance and spirit which makes “tired hearts refreshed and dead hopes stir with the nearness of life; faith is the “promise of tomorrow at the close of everyday, the triumph of life in the defiance of death, and the assurance that love is sturdier than fate, right is more confident than wrong, that good is more permanent than evil.
Instruction: Explain and discuss role of the Kwanzaa value faith in your family and community.
