Community
Kaiser mental health staff members of the National Union of Health Workers reach agreements with the HMO and call off strike planned for Monday.
This year, Oakland Tech turned 100, and its alums have planned a celebration lasting an entire year.
The Centennial Celebration, organized by staff, students and alumni, included a gala over Memorial Day weekend, a talent show for students and alumni in February, and the creation of a book, video and website commemorating the anniversary. “This centennial was kind of a fun opportunity to show off the school and how well it’s doing, especially to its alumni, who might have become disengaged over the course of the years,” said Dan Williams, a parent of three Oakland Tech alums and a key player in the planning process for the celebration. Williams said his children “were very different, and did different things, academically were in very different places, but all had a great time,” he said. “And as I quickly found out, Tech’s an amazing school with an amazing history.”
Born in East Oakland and raised in the Bay Area, Imara is an astronomer and a researcher at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, holding the prestigious title of a Harvard-MIT Future Faculty Leader Postdoctoral Fellow. Not only was she was the first African American woman to get a Ph.D. in astrophysics from UC Berkeley, but she is also a self-taught painter.
The gamers’ cries were punctuated by clocks of game controllers, flips of cards and a crackle of pizza crusts—all part of the soundtrack at Reddit on November 7 as the social networking and news site participated in Extra Life’s 24-hour Game Day to raise money for Children’s Hospital Oakland.
The Raiders Foundation hosted the event in advance of Veterans’ Day November 11, inviting veterans from organizations including Sentinels of Freedom, Wounded Warrior Project and Special Operations Warrior Foundation, to spend the afternoon with Raider players and the Raiderettes.
Since 2010, the Bay Area’s cannabis industry has been unionizing, in almost every case by the United Food and Commercial Workers, or UFCW.
Underground Runway presented “Blaq Beauty,” a grassroots fashion show, at Parliament bar and night space in Old Oakland on Friday night.
Carlos Mendoza, a high school student, comes every Monday night at Liberating Ourselves Locally for Hack Night. Sitting in the back of the room next to his mentor, Mendoza takes out his laptop and starts typing. At 18 he is one of the group’s youngest members. He also has a big project underway: Mendoza is creating his own video game.
On Monday, Wells Fargo launched a partnership with OBDC in an effort to support small businesses in the Bay Area. Through the Wells Fargo Works for Small Business: Diverse Community Capital program the bank will be partnering with CDFIs, including OBDC and later other local groups, to lend out $75 million to small businesses nationwide over the next three years.