Immigration
On Tuesday evening, about 120 people gathered at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center to attend a “neighborhood design session” held by the city. The session was a public meeting to discuss challenges in Oakland’s Chinatown and to generate ideas for the city’s “Downtown Oakland Specific Plan,” which will lay out a long-term vision for the area. “There are three big ideas that we are working with as part of this plan,” said Gregory Hodge, a social change entrepreneur at Khepera…
Lina Park was recently named the executive director of the Korean American Community Foundation of San Francisco. She discusses her new role, the community’s biggest hidden issues and cultural taboos.
In Oakland, city officials and immigration advocacy groups are preparing for the worst and hoping for the best after an alarm was sounded earlier this month, notifying the Bay Area that federal immigration officials could be planning massive raids on undocumented immigrant communities in the coming weeks. On January 16, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that federal immigration officials are preparing to arrest more than 1,500 undocumented people in Northern California. This news came the same day that the Oakland…
On Thursday morning at the youth center at Skyline High School in Oakland, about 10 women sat around a table and practiced shouting. “I want to speak with my lawyer!” demonstrated Antonio Medrano, the chapter chair of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Northern California’s Berkeley/North East Bay chapter. He stood in front of them and said, “Repeat it!” The women repeated the sentence with louder voices: “I want to speak with my lawyer!” They were participating in a…
The Asian Pacific Islander Student Achievement is doing a targeted outreach to bring resources for Arab families
On Tuesday evening, approximately 80 people gathered at Oakland Senior High School in the upper theater for the Daze of Justice film showing and community healing event presented by the school district’s English Language Leaner and Multilingual Achievement Office and its Sanctuary Task Force.
2017 brought a new group of student reporters to Oakland North from across the country and the globe. They covered a city in flux: a housing and homelessness crisis that shows no sign of abating, a school district facing millions in budget cuts, a citywide crackdown on warehouse spaces in the wake of the Ghost Ship fire, and local reactions to the new immigration and sanctuary city polices coming out of Washington under the new Donald Trump administration. But they also dug…
Cynthia Obleton was born and raised in Abandze, a coastal town in Ghana’s Central Region. She started braiding at age fifteen and opened her first salon at seventeen. In 2010, Obleton moved from Ghana to Oakland, where she started a braiding business at her house. In 2014, she opened Sankofa Braiding and Natural HairCare in South Berkeley. She says she wants her salon to be a place where black women feel comfortable. “I realized that I’m living in a place where…
Nghiep Ke Lam remembers when he learned that “violence is okay.” He was around 8 or 9 years old and was living in San Francisco, California. He still often thinks of the moment when six bullies surrounded him and told him, “You have two choices.” The first choice was to fight with one of them; the second choice was to be beaten up. Lam pointed out one kid and said, “I’m going to fight with him.” They fought until the…