Homelessness
When she was 12, Gabby Falzone and her family became homeless in New York. At 15, she ran away. She moved between squats and stints with her family, but said she suffered too much abuse from them to stay for long. At 17, she moved to Boston, where she said she survived by exchanging sex for rent. At 19, she got into a friend’s car and drove to San Francisco. Within a month, she said, she was shooting heroin. “I…
The Black Panther Party (BPP) was founded on October 15, 1966 in Oakland, California by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. The party was a political organization that agitated for greater rights for Black people in the United States. Seale and Newton captured the attention of the country (and of law enforcement) through their tactic of openly carrying rifles and shotguns while observing police officers in their community.
Stay the course. That was the message given to those sitting in the front row of Oakland’s city council chambers Friday night, when friends and supporters gathered to watch 29 men and women graduate from the BOSS Career Training and Employment Center, in a ceremony that acknowledged the significant hurdles they had overcome to gain employment while under the supervision of the Alameda County Probation Department. BOSS, which stands for Building Opportunities for Self-Sufficiency, is an East Bay non-profit which…
After a year of collecting eviction data and personal accounts, members of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project unveiled their latest oral history map and urged supporters to take action by protesting and raising awareness of evictions.
“Dogtown Redemption,” a documentary film shot over seven years in West Oakland, follows the lives of three local shopping cart recyclers.
BOSS staffers joined hands with Albany High School students to help some 1,000 people address a variety of health and social needs at their first homeless resource fair held in Oakland. Based on an event the organization holds in San Francisco called the Homeless Project Connect, executive director Donald Frazier said he decided it was time to try the project in the East Bay.
Oakland has become a city of mosts: the most unaffordable city in America, the fourth most expensive city, and the city with the fastest growing inequality, according the Brookings Institution.
Median rents across Oakland are at an all-time high, pushing low-income families into motels or family members’ homes, pricing working-class households out of their neighborhoods and creating fierce competition for available housing at all income levels.
In 2016, Fred Finch Youth Center in Oakland will celebrate 125 years of mental health and social services.