A Note From Our Founder

Over 10 years HOLLA has situated itself in East Portland as a culturally responsive mentoring organization that matches Black, Brown and Indigenous children with mentors that look like them and represent their ways of being in the world.  We believe you cannot be what you cannot see and our mentors embody those possibilities.  We believe in the power and potential of Black, Brown and Indigenous children and seek to create spaces for them to show up in society as their full selves. 

This is the reason we have launched the HOLLA School.  As an organization we surmised that if HOLLA was the call out to the community, then HOLLA School was the natural response to serve our children in an academic model that honors their lived experience, promotes the whole child and meets them where they are at by exploring their curiosity, criticality and creativity.

The HOLLA School community is rich and vibrant.  We emphasize developing skills in the following areas:  literacy, mathematics, agriculture, entrepreneurship, arts and technology. We believe our students are dreamers and innovators, thinkers and creators, educators and future entrepreneurs and leaders in every facet of our society.

HOLLA School's logo is inspired by Hip hop artists such as Kendrick Lamar, who opines in his song Mortal Man, “The butterfly represents the talent, the thoughtfulness, and the beauty within the caterpillar.”  We believe our students are those butterflies that are designed to fly and break out of the normalized social, systemic and institutions that have kept them cocooned.  We are abundant, brilliant and creative.