Community
Oakland is the right location for a marijuana exhibition, because it is a “cannabis-friendly city,” says curator Sarah Seiter.
Guests could hear music and laughter the moment they walked through the entrance of Building L at Merritt College one chilly March evening. They were here for the community open house for the new Africana Studies Community Research Center and Curriculum, which focuses on educating the public on African-American Studies and history. Every inch of the room was occupied by excited attendees, trays of soul food, decorations and detailed pamphlets that explained how the interactive curriculum in the center’s computer…
Cephus “Uncle Bobby” Johnson got the call in the afternoon. “You better get your butt down here,” Patrisse Cullors told him. She was standing on a corner of Oakland’s Frank Ogawa Plaza with five activists from London, each of whom had lost a family member to police violence. They were jetlagged and wearing matching T-shirts. “You’re supposed to be here,” Cullors said. A self-possessed woman with short, dreaded hair, Cullors is a co-founder of Black Lives Matter. Johnson is the…
“Ghost Town to Havana,” screened in Berkeley on Saturday, tells the stories behind the youth baseball team the Oakland Royals and its visit to Cuba’s capital.
Under the Maximum Family Grant Rule, if a woman has a baby ten months after becoming a CalWORKs recipient, she will not receive additional cash aid for the infant. Exceptions to the rule include pregnancies resulting from rape, incest, or the failure of specific types of contraception like an IUD, often considered a more invasive form of birth control.
Despite being one of the dance capitals of the world, with 73 public and private colleges and universities offer dance majors, for decades there hasn’t been a single-subject teaching credential in dance for the California public school system.
California’s FAIR Act is an attempt to diversify history curriculum—specifically, to represent in history lessons people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender and people with disabilities. The FAIR Education Act, or SB 48, went into effect on January 1, 2012. The law requires elementary, middle and high schools to represent these groups in history curriculum in a way that is “fair, accurate, inclusive and respectful”—or FAIR.
On March 23, members of the Pandora team held a music day at Roots International Academy, a middle school in East Oakland. This is a continuation of their Little Kids Rock program, which works to bring music education to schools serving a low-income student population.
Entrepreneurs from other industries are moving into the space and creating a social bubble that excludes the “underground” group.