Baker's Martial Arts Cultural Center is a family based business that was founded to give people a friendly, down-to-earth place to learn the powerful art of Tae Kwon Do.
After receiving his Black Belt, Mr. Baker began teaching in 1973 at the Young Adult Project ("the YAP") in Berkeley CA, a Model Cities program for inner city youth. Classes were held 3 days each week, lasting from 4 to 8 PM and few excuses were accepted for missing a single class! The class members were mostly very healthy and athletically talented youth with an occasional younger child and older adult (who struggled along to keep up!) Mr. Baker taught at the YAP for seven years and by June 1980, had promoted 13 students to Black Belt. He opened his studio, Baker's Martial Arts in 1980 in a storefront in Berkeley. He quickly came to realize that classes should not be 4 hours long, that there are important reasons that students may miss classes, and that individuals have very different learning styles and different needs.
Baker's Martial Arts was a fixture in the Berkeley community for 18 years until it moved to this Oakland location in 1998
