The Knoxville Area Urban League is an affiliate of the National Urban League, the nation’s oldest and largest community-based movement devoted to empowering African Americans to enter the economic and social mainstream. In 1968, we were founded at the height of the Civil Rights movement to promote equal employment opportunities for African Americans in Knoxville, Tennessee. Today, the Urban League is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, interracial community-based organization, serving a diverse client base in Knox, Blount and Anderson Counties.
Our agenda sets us apart. Our goal is to build a strong bridge between education and work; provide more pathways for young people and adults to secure a quality education, employment and grow professionally; create opportunities for entrepreneurship; and, through diversity and inclusion, help transform the greater Knoxville area into a place where everyone can succeed, thrive and enjoy raising their families. Diversity and inclusion are critically important, an economic principle that should be on everyone’s agenda.
The Mission
Our Mission is to enable African Americans, other minority groups and the underserved to secure economic self-reliance, parity, power and civil rights. To reach our goal, our organization offers four programs:
Youth and Education, to improve educational opportunities for at-risk students, support academic achievement and encourage civic involvement;
Workforce Development, to assist individuals with jobs that allows them to earn a decent wage and provide a reasonable standard of living;
Housing, a two-fold strategy to address housing retention for those facing foreclosure and utilizing a housing market advantageous to buyers;
Economic and Business Development, to assist individuals who possess entrepreneurial vision, ingenuity, drive and desire to gain access to resources needed to establish and grow a viable business enterprise.
What Would You Do with $5,000 and a Day of Service?
We would host a Financial Empowerment Day. The event would focus on empowering the community through individual counseling while also providing group presentations on buying a home for the first time, financial challenges affecting the unbanked, and making investments for the future.
Funds received would be utilized to create material, promote the event and purchase food.