Community

Discussions of food, community well being, and employment intersected in West Oakland on Wednesday at the city’s first “Ready, Set, Grow” event, a forum on jobs in sustainable food systems and health. Put on by the Alliance for Oakland’s Food Systems, which is headed up by People’s Grocery, the event brought together a who’s-who of Oakland’s non-profits that are hiring, and people looking for work to help them prepare for and find jobs.

Today, reporter Alexis Kenyon walks you through West Oakland as part of our continuing series of Oakland street Photography.

In December, 2010 the city attorney’s office sued the National Lodge and the Economy Inn under California’s Red Light Abatement Act, which requires hotel owners to prevent prostitution on their property. The lawsuits include many instances of crime, including prostitution and child prostitution. The city is now trying to shut down both hotels in an ongoing trial that continues Friday.

At the beginning of the year, the Oakland City Council started preparing to merge parking enforcement services with the Oakland Police Department to save the city money.

Under the policy at the time, each parking enforcement employee would have been subject to the lowest level of background checks that all OPD employees are subject to, which stirred controversy.

Over the years, Fairyland has kept its focus on storytelling alive. Each week, the puppets go live in front of a crowd of children, telling classic tales like “Sleeping Beauty” and more obscure ones the puppet masters have borrowed from other cultures. “You don’t need a lot of technology to tell a story,” says C.J. Hirschfield, Director of Fairyland. “And it is how we pass along our culture – whatever it is – through the stories, through generations.”

Detention Dialogues is the first immigration detention visitation program in California. Each week one of 40 trained volunteers visits detainees, mostly from Central and Latin America. Their hope is to bridge the gap of isolation by visiting detainees on a regular basis and supporting them throughout their detention by contacting family members on their behalf, connecting them to attorneys and forging a bond with the outside American world.

The Golden Gate Recreation Center could be close to receiving a much-needed upgrade to its facilities after securing a grant from the city, with more money from the state on the way if an application is approved.

Oakland North is continuing with our feature. Every week, we will publish a photo submitted by one of our readers. This week’s photo is by Sean Reinhart.

All night, fighters will come and go, the post-apocalyptic backdrop will change, and, in the end, one person will be crowned the victor of the first “Fight Night” video game tournament at Oakland’s new Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment.