Politics
On Saturday members of Lavender Seniors, based in Oakland, gathered at the San Leandro Community Church—where it has been meeting the second Saturday of each month for the past 18 years—to celebrate its final potluck lunch at that facility.
A gymnasium full of teachers, teenagers and community members are sitting around small tables and jotting down the names of their favorite teachers on blue Post-It notes at Edna Brewer Middle School. Stephanie Benjamin, a 17-year-old peer educator with Youth Uprising, met her favorite teacher during elementary school in Oakland. She reads from her Post-It: “Ms. Wallis knew what was going on with us. She wouldn’t just get on you for not doing your work, she’d try to figure out…
At a special meeting of the Community Policing Advisory Board Wednesday night at Oakland City Hall, Robert Wasserman called for residents to support the crime reduction strategies being suggested by the consultants, insisting that the plan would only work if everyone in the city took part.
Affordable housing advocates gathered at Tuesday night’s Oakland City Council meeting to urge elected officials to prioritize building and funding affordable housing citywide, saying that for vulnerable groups, new projects are the difference between living on the streets or living in a home.
Federal Judge Thelton Henderson named former Baltimore Police Commissioner Thomas C. Frazier as the new compliance director of the Oakland Police Department on Monday.
On behalf of Oakland’s family literacy programs, student Malak Alsabahi stood at the podium and asked the school board not to cut adult education. Fellow supporters held paintings of Yemeni women while Alsabahi spoke, representing classmates who could not be there at the school board meeting Wednesday.
About three dozen American Indian Model Schools (AIMS) students and parents took turns Wednesday, each speaking for one minute, hoping to convince the Oakland school board that their three schools shouldn’t be shut down. The board voted in January to give the AIMS administration a “notice of intent to revoke” the schools’ charters after alleging fraud and financial mismanagement at the schools.
In celebration of Black History Month, Alameda County Supervisor Keith Carson and other community leaders hosted the 2nd Annual African American Organizations Making Connections “Strategies and Outcomes for Our Black Community” event on Saturday.
In January, about a month after the massacre that left 27 people dead in Newtown, Connecticut, Vice President Joe Biden met with a group of 12 religious leaders to discuss national strategies to combat gun violence. President Barack Obama, who supports background checks as well as a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazine, had tasked Biden with heading a commission to come up with recommendations on gun policy. One of the leaders present at Biden’s meeting was Pastor…