This fun, family friendly community event is free and open to the public. Come on by Saturday, November 4, 2023 from 12 noon to 4 pm at the Hillside Community Center (located at 925 S. Institute) for our 26th Pre-Kwanzaa African Marketplace featuring a variety of African craft, professionals, artists & merchants. Unique cultural art, clothing, and crafts will be available for purchase. Meet several members of dynamic community organizations and businesses and learn about their programs & services.

This event will also feature performances by poets, spoken-word artists, storytellers, and a special performance by African drummers and dancers. This community event is a prelude to our 34th Annual Colorado Springs Citywide Kwanzaa Celebration December 26-31 held at the In-Balance Wellness Studio (2820 East Pikes Peak; C.S.,CO)

This event is presented by the Kuumba Cultural Collective of Southern Colorado (formerly known as the Colorado Springs Citywide Kwanzaa Celebration). We are a 501(c)3 tax exempt, Colorado nonprofit organization.

Annual Colorado Springs Citywide Kwanzaa Celebration

For those truly interested in learning more about Kwanzaa, view “The Black Candle” narrated by Maya Angelou on TUBI

Kwanzaa  celebrates the best and highest of the values, history, culture, philosophy, and achievements of African people (living in America and in other parts of the world).  Come and join in this celebration of family, community, and culture.

All around the world, on every continent in the world, throughout the world African community, African people, in the name and framework of Kwanzaa, will gather together to celebrate themselves. And this year as always, they will celebrate family, community and culture. That is to say, they will celebrate the good, beauty and sacredness of their lives, the indispensable caring, sharing and shielding foundation of family and community and the ancient, rich, varied and instructive cultural values and practices that ground Kwanzaa, define us as a people, and direct us forward on the upward paths of our ancestors. Indeed, at the heart and center of the holiday, Kwanzaa is its concern with and stress on embracing and practicing its core values, the Nguzo Saba (The Seven Principles) and related communitarian African values.  Nguzo Saba are a Black value system, a set of communitarian African values which aid us in grounding ourselves righteously and rightly, directing our lives toward good and expansive ends, and toward conceiving and bringing into being the good communities, societies and world we all want and work and struggle so hard to bring into being.

Our Umoja (Unity) Opening Ceremony 6-7:30 pm on December 26, 2023, highlights the first and foundational principle of the Nguzo Saba.  Unity as principled and harmonious togetherness is a cardinal virtue in both classical and general African societies. 

34^th Annual Colorado Springs Citywide Kwanzaa Celebration is held 6-7:30pm each day December 26^th through December 31^st at In-Balance Wellness Studio located at 2820 East Pikes Peak.