Meet Tobias Tubbs | Huma House C0-Founder

We had the good fortune of connecting with Tobias Tubbs and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Tobias, is your business focused on helping the community? If so, how?
Huma House is an arts organization in Leimart Park Los Angeles that cares for and empowers the re entry community and system impacted youth. Our vision is to illuminate artists from sacred pockets of the world to reveal truths that will lead nations into peace and youth into their own personal power.

We are a community led grassroots movement that actively addresses the crisis of incarceration at hand through powerful alternatives. Through our art exhibitions, garden workshops, mentoring, and summer programs we provide creative methods of care to system impacted youth and previously incarcerated people.

When you help the community you help the world. We show people that they are loved, valued and that they are architects of their own freedom and destiny.

Can you give our readers an introduction to your business? Maybe you can share a bit about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
Huma House is a movement for all peoples. We use art as the foundational element to sing the words of our ancestors and send the message of love. We are are re-entry organization which means that in the DNA of our foundership we have formerly incarcerated people like myself guiding people from all walks of life to “re enter” back into society after coming out of prison. We are also shepherding people who have been imprisoned by limitations, their mindsets, their fear, and loneliness to “re enter” their humanity. This is the beauty, the uniqueness and the power of what Huma House offers the world, all the in the heart of Leimart Park.

The reason that I am drawn to re entry is that in 1991 I was given a sentence of life without the possibility of parole for a crime I didn’t commit. For 30 years I worked in some of California’s roughest prisons. In this space I was able to connect and identify the needs of men from the ages of 17-70 years of age. For the healing work I helped men get past their worst moments and we changed together. From this seed, I met Meetra Johansen. She was already moving in the spirit of creation of the great Huma Bird which represents all matriarchal birds, the Sankofa, the Quetzlcoatl, and we merged and fused our vision together. We met at the first exhibition she put on at the activist art show she put on at The Bail Project which alarmed people about what was happening inside the prisons during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. I was bringing the artwork of our brother, friend and my last cellmate – Kenneth Webb – who was apart of that first important show. We synchronized our vision and created Huma to free the mind from imprisonment of limiting thoughts, the heart from suffering and the body from incarceration using art. We created this for young men and women who were similarly situated as myself was in 1991. Huma House was birthed in this space of freedom.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
Hot and Cool Cafe in Leimart Park for drinks The rocks at Will Rogers State beach
Take them to Fabian’s Homeboy Art Academy on the East Side
Dinner at Alta in West Adams

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
This shout out is dedicated to Kimi Lent who is the superior court expert for gang involved youth and the Founder of Big Dogg Gang Intervention and Violence Prevention

Website: www.huma-house.org

Instagram: huma_house

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meetrajohansen

Image Credits
Meetra Johansen, Tobias Tubbs