Chris Harland-Dunaway

Garden program provides crucial link for parolees after prison

The blender roared to life, shredding kale, mint, strawberries, bananas and ice into a delicious concoction. Anthony Forrest, the smoothie maker, handed cups of the nutritious potion to the students surrounding him in the school garden at Fremont High School in East Oakland. Forrest and his colleague Vernon Ray Dailey both work for Planting Justice, a nonprofit advocating for locally grown food, food education, jobs and shared green spaces. Forrest and Dailey are not secretive about their past: Between the…

Port of Oakland

If you want to know how a mouse would feel if it got caught beneath a stampede of elephants, ride your bike around the Port of Oakland at 11 o’clock on a Thursday. All sense of scale is lost against a limitless stream of 18-wheelers rumbling to pick up their cargo container. They join the half-mile line of idling trucks, with acrid fumes drifting from their smokestacks, comingling with the lung-stretching heaviness of blacktop in the sun. Santiago Diaz, from Woodland,…