Health
On Friday, over 60 Havenscourt neighborhood residents gathered at Carter Gilmore Park in East Oakland to attend “Friday Summer Nights at the Park,” a weekly series of family-friendly fun nights hosted by Messengers 4 Change, a coalition of Oakland organizations and residents working together to decrease violence. At the same time, a similar party was happening further east at Willie Wilkins Park in the Elmhurst neighborhood. The goal of these Friday night events is to decrease street violence by turning strangers into neighbors.
On Thursday Seattle Seahawks running back Marshawn Lynch and San Francisco 49ers quarterback Josh Johnson gave a $500 scholarship to Oakland gunshot victim Gerald Williams, a former Castlemont High School student who will be studying business management at San Diego State University this fall. Nearly 200 people attended the ceremony held to recognize Williams’ achievement of what organizers said was a milestone in his academic career, which had been disrupted by the shooting incident. The award ceremony was held during…
Oakland’s dispensary ordinance, which has been on the books since 2004, is lauded by city officials—a staff report from the City Administrator’s Office published in July, 2011, calls it “a role model for the nation”—and is generally well-respected among local dispensary owners who consider it fair to them and the city. It requires that dispensary operators follow certain rules: sharing annual financial audits and personnel records with the city, making sure there’s proper security and safe access for patients, and making sure clients aren’t a nuisance to the neighborhood.
But there could be major changes brewing for how Oakland’s dispensaries are regulated.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to uphold President Barack Obama’s signature law, the Affordable Care Act, this week came as a lifeline to the most needy in Oakland’s ongoing efforts to provide medical support to AIDS patients.
On Saturday, 200 Bay Area residents put on their stretchy yoga pants and unrolled their colourful exercise mats to help Children’s Hospital and Research Center Oakland. For eight hours, barefoot participants moved and stretched their bodies at Richmond’s Craneway Pavilion to inaugurate the first annual Yoga Reaches Out Bay Area Yogathon.
The energy was palpable, with people filling the entryway, shaking hands and engaging in excited conversations as they waited for the ceremony celebrating the opening of Girls Inc’s new location in downtown Oakland to begin on Thursday. The organization works with girls to help them with literacy, career goals and to learning to care for themselves, both emotionally and physically.
Two Oakland based organizations, the National Coalition of 100 Black Women Inc. and advocacy group California Prostitute Education Project (CAL-PEP) are leading efforts to reduce the rate of new HIV infections among young people in Oakland with free testing and a billboard campaign dubbed “Sistahs Getting Real about HIV.”
A study of the average weight of students in middle schools throughout California reveals that cities in Alameda and Contra Costa counties have a high number of children who fall into the category of overweight or obese, including nearly half of the kids in Oakland and Richmond.
“It’s a problem that is impacting so many of the kids in the whole country, even though our study focused on California,” said Susan Babey, a UCLA Health Center for Policy Research senior research scientist who was one of the co-authors of the study.
Children’s Hospital Oakland & Research Institute is home to the largest and most comprehensive sickle cell treatment program in the state. The center draws many patients and their families to the area, where they can receive a lifetime of quality care.