This Public-Private Partnership Is Using Arts and Culture as a Catalyst for Racial Justice in Oakland
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One of Oakland Bloom's chefs, Kit Lam with her father and mother. Her father gave out free hand drawn calligraphy prints for visitors. (Photo by Joyce xi)
Cities are centers of tremendous wealth, but also deep inequality. As the world rapidly urbanizes, with more than half of the global population now living in cities, more philanthropic funders are working to develop what Susan S. Fainstein calls “the just city” — an equitable, democratic and diverse place where all residents feel a sense of belonging.
In Oakland, a private-public partnership is seeking to show what a just city can look like by supporting collaborative efforts that combine organizing, movement-building, and arts and culture work.
Belonging in Oakland: A Just City Cultural Fund is a collaboration between the Akonadi Foundation, East Bay Community Foundation (EBCF) and the City of Oakland's Cultural Affairs division. The fund also receives major support from the Surdna Foundation's Radical Imagination for Racial Justice Initiative. Surdna has committed $2.85 million over six years. Through 2022, Akonadi and EBCF have raised about $105,000 and $176,800, respectively.
The fund’s goal is to support BIPOC cultural practitioners to “radically imagine” a society that is free from racial oppression and the practices and policies that have allowed structural racism to continue. At the heart of the fund's work is the idea that “the transformative power of the arts” can serve as a catalyst for racial justice in Oakland.
“It’s painting the face. It’s telling a story. And it’s telling you what needs to happen. So it’s not just telling the atrocity that has occurred, but it’s also saying, ‘Here's how we can fix it. This is what has been done wrong, and this is what needs to be done now,’” said Deborah Giles, program director for the East Bay Community Foundation.
Now in its fourth cycle, the fund recently announced its latest round of grantees, which are three partnerships between organizations. The first is Belonging and Justice, a collaboration between Asian Prisoner Support Committee and Asian Refugees United that will target the immigration system, which leads to over-incarceration, deportation and separation of immigrant families in Oakland. The effort will work with current and formerly incarcerated people to elevate their stories, shift public opinion and push for better policies.
The second collaboration is Ecosystems for Economic and Racial Justice, a partnership between Oakland Bloom and Sticky Rice Club supporting workers, merchants and residents in Oakland's Chinatown. The effort will primarily support cooperative real estate and business development models, the activation of public and private spaces through inclusive neighborhood events, and policy advocacy.
The third is RE-MEMBER, RESIST AND RECLAIM (R3), a collaboration between Black Cultural Zone Community Development Corporation, Alena Museum, Black Terminus, and East Side Arts Alliance. R3 hopes to create a model for a just city by supporting a renaissance in legacy Black communities, and a flourishing economy anchored by Black arts, culture and commerce. One goal is for cooperatively owned Black Cultural Hubs to make up at least a quarter of the city's commercial landscape.
Each project will receive a three-year grant of $100,000 per year. In addition, grantees will receive a $12,000 stipend and a $25,000 grant to document the collaboration. Organizations across all projects will be able to meet as a cohort to share ideas, theories and to talk about their experiences. Whereas previous grant cycles were focused on the narrative aspect of the work and supporting organizations that would highlight some of the things that were happening in Oakland, this round of grants go beyond that.
“This year, we decided not just to focus on cultural practitioners, but to focus on cultural practitioners as well as movement-building and organizing, that we would pair the two together to have a focus on long-term change,” Giles said.
Giles hopes that the EBCF — and potentially other funders — can raise additional dollars to continue to support the program beyond the six years that Surdna is backing it. Beyond its work in Oakland, Giles hopes that the fund will be able to serve as a model for other cities looking to become more just places to live.
Supporting a just Oakland
The Belonging in Oakland fund grew out of the Surdna Foundation's work to support just and sustainable communities. Guided by its overarching racial justice strategy, Surdna's Thriving Cultures program does several things: It invests in artists of color who work alongside communities of color to “imagine and build racially just systems and structures”; it invests in researchers and cultural critics of color to interpret and publicize these works; and advances the role that artists and communities of color play in shaping narratives, policy and philanthropy.
According to Giles, the City of Oakland already had a relationship with Surdna, but wanted to bring in other foundations to collaborate on the work, recruiting the East Bay Community Foundation and Akonadi. Giles describes East Bay Community Foundation as “a natural fit” for the fund's work, as its own grantmaking and practices were already deeply aligned.
EBCF, Giles stressed, is not interested in dictating what organizations need to do, and instead focusing on providing support. “We don't walk into the community, saying, ‘We're the experts. You could come to our table and sit down and we can tell you how to do it.’ No, we're at the back of the room. We'll come to your table,” Giles said.
One of the more unique aspects of the fund is the supplemental support it provides. Since the projects are a way to incubate and test out new ideas, grantees receive an additional $25,000 grant to document their work and what they learned from it. “It's not always about succeeding,” Giles said. “We have some failures, but it’s okay. You learn from your mistakes.”
In addition, grantees receive a $12,000 cultural practitioner stipend, which can be used for whatever they need, including things like childcare or paying bills.
“People are starting to understand that these things are really important, but it's rare for me to see an organization or foundation that actually puts money toward it in this really intentional way,” said Sean Chow, founder and executive director of Sticky Rice Club. “To me, that's really powerful because there's the work and then…. there's the people.”
Revitalizing Chinatown
The two partner organizations of Ecosystems for Economic and Racial Justice — Oakland Bloom and Sticky Rice Club — are focused on uplifting Oakland's Chinatown. Oakland Bloom, which Chow also founded, is dedicated to supporting poor and working class refugee and immigrant chefs to start their own businesses, primarily through its business and incubator program, the Open Test Kitchen. The organization also seeks to make the restaurant industry more equitable by developing cooperative food businesses and new financial models that prioritize community safety, workers' rights and pathways to ownership.
Its partner organization, Sticky Rice Club, works to strengthen Chinatown through the development of public and commercial spaces, as well as programs that promote equity, collective ownership and community safety. The organization began as a way to extend opportunities for chefs beyond Oakland Bloom's cooperative kitchen.
Their joint project aims to shift the overall narrative around Chinatown and develop collective spaces that will allow chef entrepreneurs to establish businesses while also activating spaces in the area where people can come together, creating neighborhood events and advocating for better and more inclusive policies.
“When I think of Chinatown and the energy I feel there, a lot of what I feel is at the core of the issues. In Chinatown, it’s a lot of distrust. It’s… a scarcity mindset. It's a lot of fear. And that drives a lot of the policies in Chinatown, so you see a lot of overpolicing and you see the way the narratives are shaped and driven by certain stakeholders and media platforms,” Chow said.
After four in the afternoon, he pointed out, the neighborhood is empty and there are police cars on every corner. For Chow, the project goes beyond simply creating economic models to financially revitalize the neighborhood. Rather, it seeks to create a space that's rooted in compassion and one that will change the narrative around it.
“We are embarking on a three-year commitment to building within Oakland's Chinatown with different networks and partners and merchants and residents,” said Diana Wu, Oakland Bloom's executive director. “They're focusing on how [to] foster resilience and support a thriving neighborhood that is really connected with one another and… grounded in that kind of intentionality, passion and healing.”
The first year of the project will be focused on infrastructure and development, including hosting quarterly neighborhood events. Part of this will involve deepening relationships with other community members, working with owners to keep the neighborhood lively into the evening, and creating spaces where people can feel safe.
Last year, for example, the two organizations helped host the lantern festival to mark the end of the Lunar New Year. This took place shortly after the Monterey Park shooting, where 11 people were killed at an event celebrating the Lunar New Year. Chinatown recently hosted this year's lantern festival, which featured a night market with Oakland Bloom chefs and other market vendors, performance programs and spaces for healing.
“I think it felt particularly poignant given last year around this time, the acts of violence that had impacted the community,” Wu said.
As merchants retire and close down their businesses, the program wants to ensure there will be other businesses to succeed them, ensuring the neighborhood doesn’t remain empty. Year two will focus on identifying businesses to pilot for succession planning around cooperative development and identifying spaces that feel accessible for everyone, including working class chef entrepreneurs, and providing spaces for the community to come together to heal. Year three will be “the full activation of everything” with all of its programs running, according to Chow.
The two organizations are also looking into acquiring property to create a Hawker Center, a large, warehouse-type space that houses rows of small food stalls. The idea is to create accessible spaces for chef entrepreneurs with the goal of potentially having those chefs own parts of their stalls and part of the property. This would not only be beneficial to chefs, it would also be a community space for everyone to enjoy.
“I'm hoping through the work, we can really shed some light on what Chinatown is all about and… reshape it in a way that is rooted in its traditions but that is also inclusive of our surrounding neighborhoods,” Chow said. “I've always seen Chinatown as a really strong resource, not just for folks in the community, but [for] the folks outside, as well.”
