By Post Staff

The City of Oakland has won a $675,800 grant from Partnership for the Bay’s Future (PBF) that will fund a two-year fellow to work in the Housing and Community Development (HCD) Department to support the development of lead hazard abatement and proactive rental inspection initiatives.

The award will assist in Oakland’s work to reduce lead hazards in older rental housing, especially in communities most impacted by housing instability. The City hired a consultant, Green and Healthy Homes Initiative, in 2024 to lead the technical aspect of the lead abatement work. By exploring the integration of lead hazard abatement with proactive rental inspections, the fellow’s work will aim to improve living conditions for families at risk of exposure and create safer homes for Oakland’s residents.

“We are grateful for the support of Partnership for the Bay’s Future for this award,” said Emily Weinstein, HCD director. “Housing safety and habitability are top priorities for our work in the coming year, and this fellow will ensure specific attention is paid to creating equitable solutions.”

The fellow will be dedicated full-time for the next two years to facilitate collaboration between HCD, Planning and Building Department (PBD), and a coalition of community partners. The total benefit to the City of Oakland is at least $675,800, of which $220,000 goes to a collaborative of community organizations to support the work.

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The Healthy Havenscourt Collaborative brings essential community expertise to the project, connecting Oakland residents with resources and ensuring the program aligns with their needs.

These partners will engage residents directly to shape the program and make sure their voices are central to its design and implementation.

Coalition partners include Regional Asthma Management and Prevention (RAMP), La Clinica de la Raza, EBALDC, and Black Cultural Zone – all of which form the Healthy Havenscourt collaborative.

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By Mike Kinney, The Richmond Standard

About 600 local families received not only toys but also food, fresh poultry, and bicycles this holiday season, courtesy of a Richmond community that has banded together every year since 1989 to ensure children and their families in need can have a happy holiday.

The Richmond Fire and Police Holiday Drive, which takes several months and many volunteers to pull off, culminated Saturday with the annual giveaway event at the DeJean Middle School auditorium.

“We couldn’t have done it without the support of our incredible partners like Chevron, Mechanics Bank, Chevron Fire, the Richmond Police Officers Association, the Richmond Firefighters Association, the Richmond Rotary which donated bikes, the Fire Academy, the Richmond Police Explorer Post 110, Touch of New Life, and so many other volunteers and organizations who stepped up to help,” Richmond police officials said.

The Richmond Fire and Police Holiday Program was inspired back in 1989 by now-retired Richmond firefighter Rod Woods, who organized a toy drive. Around that time, the Richmond Police Department had been running a food drive. After many years of growing their separate programs, Fire and Police united as one, with the Chevron Fire Department also stepping up and adding its continued support.

The annual program involves setting out toy donation bins at police and fire stations and donations from individuals, businesses and organizations. For a third year in a row, East Brother Beer Co. hosted a benefit event or the holiday program.

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Special to The Post

When grants were announced Oct. 1, it was noted that eight of the 22 MacArthur Fellows were African American. Among the recipients of the so-called ‘genius grants’ are scholars, visual and media artists a poet/writer, historian, and dancer/choreographer who each receive $800,000 over a five-year period to spend as they see fit.

 Their names are Ruha Benjamin, Jericho Brown, Tony Cokes, Jennifer L. Morgan, Ebony G. Patterson, Shamel Pitts, Jason Reynolds, and Dorothy Roberts. This is the eighth and last in the series highlighting the Black awardees. The report below on Dorothy Roberts is excerpted from the MacArthur Fellows web site.

A graduate of Yale University with a law degree from Harvard, Dorothy Roberts is a legal scholar and public policy researcher exposing racial inequities embedded within health and social service systems.

Sine 2012, she has been a professor of Law and Sociology, and on the faculty in the department of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Roberts’s work encompasses reproductive health, bioethics, and child welfare. She sheds light on systemic inequities, amplifies the voices of those directly affected, and boldly calls for wholesale transformation of existing systems.

Roberts’s early work focused on Black women’s reproductive rights and their fight for reproductive justice. In “Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty 1997)”, she analyzes historical and contemporary policies and practices that denied agency to Black women and sought to control their childbearing—from forced procreation during slavery, to coercive sterilization and welfare reform—and advocates for an expanded understanding of reproductive freedom.

This work prompted Roberts to examine the treatment of children of color in the U.S. child welfare system.

After nearly two decades of research and advocacy work alongside parents, social workers, family defense lawyers, and organizations, Roberts has concluded that the current child welfare system is in fact a system of family policing with alarmingly unequal practices and outcomes. Her 2001 book, “Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare,” details the outsized role that race and class play in determining who is subject to state intervention and the results of those interventions.

Through interviews with Chicago mothers who had interacted with Child Protective Services (CPS), Roberts shows that institutions regularly punish the effects of poverty as neglect.

CPS disproportionately investigates Black and Indigenous families, especially if they are low-income, and children from these families are much more likely than white children to be removed from their families after CPS referral.

In “Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (2022),” Roberts traces the historical, cultural, and political forces driving the racial and class imbalance in child welfare interventions.

These include stereotypes about Black parents as negligent, devaluation of Black family bonds, and stigmatization of parenting practices that fall outside a narrow set of norms.

She also shows that blaming marginalized individuals for structural problems, while ignoring the historical roots of economic and social inequality, fails families and communities.

Roberts argues that the engrained oppressive features of the current system render it beyond repair. She calls for creating an entirely new approach focused on supporting families rather than punishing them.

Her support for dismantling the current child welfare system is unsettling to some. Still, her provocation inspires many to think more critically about its poor track record and harmful design.

By uncovering the complex forces underlying social systems and institutions, and uplifting the experiences of people caught up in them, Roberts creates opportunities to imagine and build more equitable and responsive ways to ensure child and family safety.

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