Health
Listen to how Oakland residents spent a day surveying conditions of the city’s parks and other recreational areas, many of which have fallen into disarray.
Today would have been Nicholas Rotolo’s 24th birthday. Rotolo, a Berkeley High School student and club hockey player, stood a brawny 6’2″ tall, weighed 220 pounds, and had no apparent health issues. But on February 5, 2004, the 17-year-old suddenly collapsed on the rink at Sharks Ice in San Jose while competing in an exhibition for his San Jose Junior Sharks team.
On Saturday, Youth Uprising, a not-for-profit organization that develops young leaders, celebrated its third annual For A Safe Town (FAST) festival in East Oakland in an effort to promote peace. Bounce houses, basketball tournaments, skating demos, DJs, and the savory smells of a free BBQ chicken lunch attracted a couple hundred people from the community.
They squawk, they eat your scraps, they lay your breakfast, they bathe themselves with dirt: what more could you ask from backyard tenants?
Laughter, prayer, song and tears marked Saturday night’s third annual PURPLE Fundraising Gala for the families and friends of those who have lost their lives to violence. The event, organized by the Oakland-based advocacy group 1,000 Mothers to Prevent Violence, recognized two Oakland police investigators and a retired schoolteacher for having gone “beyond the call of duty to bring healing to surviving families.”
The 15th annual Creek to Bay cleanup day drew hundreds of Oakland volunteers Saturday to more than two dozen watery sites, where they yanked weeds, bagged up Styrofoam cups, and pulled golf balls and plastic bags from the water.
Local drug abuse treatment patients and providers are pushing the legislature to keep Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger from cutting Medi-Cal funding for state-supported addiction services.
The gloomy weather and a short-lived drizzle couldn’t deter the eaters and drinkers on Sunday afternoon as they sampled gourmet delicacies, fine wines and desserts on the rooftop of the Kaiser Center in Downtown Oakland for the 28th annual “A Taste of California—Up on the Roof.”
While the rest of the country memorialized the September 11 attacks and debated one Florida pastor’s threats to publicly burn the Quran, Joe Weston, owner of Temescal’s Heartwalker Studio, sought to create peace in his own small way. At sundown on the eve of the 9th anniversary of September 11, a diverse group of Oaklanders joined together to say their ecumenical prayers for peace, and they didn’t stop until the next day.