A MESSAGE FROM OUR FOUNDER:

Seattle Amistad School was founded in 2011 by Farin Houk, who served as its first head of school until 2024.

Amistad began as a collective dream. Farin and a small group of friends—all educators, parents, cultural workers, and artists—gathered to talk about issues they were seeing with their own kids’ education. Year after year, Farin and her educator friends worked hard within the system to offer the best to their students, and year after year, they saw the efforts to serve children of color fall flat within a system that couldn’t, or wouldn’t, serve them well.

Instead of trying to fix a broken system, Farin began building a new one: a center for dual language instruction, where everyone is both a learner and a teacher; where Latinx children can thrive culturally and academically in their home language. A community of educators and families coming together to raise children and, like the generations before us, inviting artists and cultural workers to teach us about self-expression, resistance to oppression, and joy.

In our founder’s own words: “We always say that Amistad is here to change the world, and the way we do that is through teaching and learning with children and families. We learn to write in order to share our ideas with the world. We learn to read in order to hear different perspectives or to understand our own better. This is how we can reach collective liberation”.