Tamara Prosper

OWNER, LEGACY TOURS

NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA, USA

Tamara Prosper is a history, culture, and architecture enthusiast who owns Legacy Tours, a tour and visit planning company through which she shares the vibrant Black & Indigenous history of women and culture of New Orleans. She has always loved reading, learning about history, and doing genealogical research, but she had never considered becoming a tour guide until members of her church, the owners of Island of Algiers Tours, suggested she try it. They paid for her first tour guide permit and she shadowed “Nu’Awlins Nate” Scott and Mama Benita on their tours through the French Quarter. Though she now has her own business, Tamara still enjoys working with them when time allows. 

Tamara also co-owns Sheaux Fresh Sustainable Foods, a business that has been providing fresh, locally sourced produce to combat New Orleans’ food apartheid since 2011. Most of her career has been in health care administration, and she has recently pivoted to cooperative business development. A perpetual writer, Tamara is the author of “The Elders”, a columnist for “Antigravity Magazine”, and a public speaker. At first glance, her various endeavors and experiences may appear to be divergent, yet they are not. 

Improving access to capital through the ancient technology of cooperation, while making fresh food accessible are aligned to address root causes of health disparities experienced by members of the global majority. Researching, remembering, and recounting the lives, actions, organizations, and contributions of Black and Indigenous people is her effort to inform and remind people that every aspect of our lives is directly connected to those who came before us. In New Orleans, and throughout the world, what we experience today is not only a result of what happened yesterday, it is tightly bound to it. Likewise, what we as individuals and as a community do today binds what happens tomorrow, be it wonderful, awful, or somewhere in between.