African American Holiday Association

African American Holiday Expo Online
"For the most positive holiday experiences ever, spend your money where it counts"

African American Holiday Expo ON-LINE

Shop with our vendors have a positive holiday experience and spend your money where it counts.

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Order our special AAHA's products to celebrate holidays, celebrations and rituals items online

A Since 1982, Ayo Handy Kendi, realized that their needed to be a cultural and spiritual alternative to the overly-commercialized holiday season, while encouraging the African American community to use this high retail shopping season as a vehicle for self-help. Beginning with 25 vendors in 1982, she organized the first "Family Afternoon Bazaar in Washington, D.C.'s downtown Lansburg Center. This event grew in two years to be the Christmas Kwanzaa Bazaar and has continued as the African American Holiday Expo. The Expo has grown steadily over the years, outgrowing several venues, offering a selling opportunity for an estimated 2,000 merchants, artists, healers and businesses who've offered quality African-centered, merchandise, crafts, health and business services. The African American Holiday Expo, has brought together a combined estimated audience of 75,000 people over the years, and has been recognized as the oldest, east coast celebration of Christmas and Kwanzaa, spawning any number of replicas in the Washington, D.C Metropolitan area and around the Nation.

As the special event grew, it spawned an organization - the African American Holiday Association (AAHA). AAHA was incorporated in 1989, by Handy-Kendi, as an outgrowth of public interest shown in holiday related, quality of life issues and the potential for organizing for social justice using holidays, celebrations and rituals. The Expo became the annual fundraiser for the non-profit organization.

Another outgrowth of the Expo event is AAHA's YEP (Youth Entrepreneur Program). Since its inception in the winter of 1989, YEP has used the holiday season to assist over 1000 District of Columbia youth, ages 9-21 offering them opportunities for skills and leadership development through a hands-on self help, learning and earning opportunity at the Expo. AAHA offers training and experiences to a "YouthPreneur" to market or sell their products and services through subsidized exhibit booth spaces through AAHA's fundraising and direct public donations for this activity. Other youth receive life, customer relations, entrepreneur and special events skills as Event Assistants, where youth receive payment for serving the public or by working with the adult event staff, with their earnings matched by the AAHA. This project, to this day, serves as a model for many other trade shows who have also recognized the vital need to "grow" their business leaders in the African American community through youth entrepreneurship.

Now in its 22st year, in 2005, the Expo is being renamed, the MarketPlace Festival and the organization takes the next growth spurt by launching The African American Holiday Expo On-Line AAHE On-Line under the same Expo slogan, "For the most positive holiday experiences ever, spend your money where it counts".

Building upon the success of the Expo, The African American Holiday Expo On-Line, will offer a virtual website experience of learning and earning that will help bridge the digital divide for African American youth and will provide self-help, economic alternatives for youth crime and violence prevention. AAHA's YEP, operated as an After-School, Rites of Passage Project, will teach youth life-skills, cultural values, computer and entrepreneur training duplicated on the virtual festival, network experience to enable youth and adult entrepreneurs to sell products and market concepts and services worldwide.

Through the use of information technology, the potential to penetrate the African American consciousness with positive values can be realized more deeply and much broader than before. AAHE On-Line will deliver a message of hope toward building strong communities and restoring the family, through presentations that demonstrate the applied application of meaningful, cultural values. Now more than ever, the African American community needs the positive values of the Nguzo Saba (7 Principles of Blackness celebrated during Kwanzaa), the 5 Principles of Black Love and the ancient Principles of Maat. Now, more than ever, these values need to be lived daily to reinforce the spiritual strength of each individual and to enhance the collective strength of a Nation, to help re-build self-esteem and pride while providing viable economic opportunities for youth in the urban cities and heartland of America that virtually offers little to no employment opportunities thus youth turn to the drug dealers and street crime bosses as the largest employers of our youth.

AAHA's YEP offers a successful track record of training youth in entrepreneurship and offering opportunities to not only learn but to earn money through our own Black culture with our own models of self-sufficiency to affect the next generation.