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High school volleyball player Hannah Hoang

The ball smacks down right in the middle of the court off of Hannah Hoang’s hand. She quickly runs back into the line, as she gets ready to deliver another devastating spike. She leaps into the air as gracefully as if she were performing ballet, but comes down hard with a spike that will make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. As a defender on the women’s volleyball team at Oakland Senior High School, Hoang is…

Competing to compete: The rise of Oakland student athletes

Some athletes have a strong passion for their sport, and play it recreationally. Others play their sports because they rely on them to escape the stress of their daily life. And still thers depend on their performance to land them an athletic scholarship, and compete within the Oakland Athletic League hoping to get recruited to college teams and compete at the National Collegiate Athletic Association level. In this series, three Oakland student athletes spoke about what brings them to the field,…

Birthing inequities: Combatting racial disparities in the health of newborns

This article is part of “Birthing Inequity,” an Oakland North project on maternal and infant health disparities in Oakland. See the full multimedia report here. In 2003, while she was carrying her third child, Tanisha Fuller had to convince her hospital caretakers that something was really wrong. Six months pregnant, and unsure of what was happening to her, she’d rushed to the emergency room with pain in her back, feeling like she couldn’t breathe. At the hospital, she was told that…

Ganja Goddess “weed prom” comes to Oakland

It’s every high schooler’s prom dream: good music, hot dates, no parents, and weed. Tons of it. Hosted by Ganja Goddess, a cannabis collective that organizes “weed retreats” for women, the Ganja Goddess Gala was a chance to re-do prom the way the collective members wanted to. With a balloon arch, a photo booth, a DJ set, a dance floor, enough sparkly plastic crowns to go around (because “everyone’s royalty tonight,” one organizer said), and buffet tables piled high with…