Community
Riley Mitchell loves to cook. When the 55-year-old isn’t bragging about making the “best potato salad this side of the Mississippi,” Mitchell enjoys cozying up with a good book. Since the pandemic, Mitchell started to re-read classics like The Color Purple, mostly for pleasure. But since the library where Mitchell took adult literacy classes closed, being able to revisit some of his favorite books has helped him maintain his hard-won reading skills. “When they first shut it down, I shut…
Forty elementary schools in Alameda County submitted reopening plans as of Oct. 16, and 10 resumed in-person learning in some capacity this week. All of them are private or charter schools.
Encrypted social media allows a broad range of people to communicate safely, from organizers of protests against police brutality to LGBTQ+ youth looking for a community to reach out to when they feel unsafe. A potential new federal law threatens to take away many of these secure methods of communication.
2019 brought a new group of student reporters to Oakland North from across the country and the globe. We covered a city that is always changing, but where tensions about city finances, policing, housing and the fate of the public schools run deep. We also produced three new episodes of our Tales of Two Cities podcast, which covers audio stories from Oakland and Richmond in collaboration with our sister site, Richmond Confidential. Click here to check out all episodes of the Tales of…
The Goodwill’s Greater East Bay headquarters on International Boulevard is a clothing reseller’s dream and a garbage system nightmare. This block-long facility is, despite its size, an inconspicuous treasure trove for resellers sifting for secondhand goods they will leave with by the cartload. The white cinderblock interior has an almost clinical feel: Clothes lie sprawled in plastic carts the size of operating tables, pushed together in a maze that only the regulars know how to navigate. This kind of retail…
The Mobile Evaluation Team (MET), an expanding crisis response unit in Oakland, is one example of fledgling efforts to meet the city’s rising need for mental health crisis services.
A lot owner wants to create an RV safe parking site–but the people living there say they can’t leave
At the Wood Street homeless encampment in West Oakland residents live in RVs and makeshift cabins but recently several have been served eviction notices.
OUSD’s board voted to close Kaiser and merge its student body and teaching staff with those already at Sankofa, to the dismay of Kaiser’s vocal supporters.
Although food insecurity—the formal term for being unable to reliably access and afford nutritious food—is on the decline in California, it’s on the rise for senior citizens.