For Carolyn Johnson, the future of East Oakland looks a lot like its past. Not the divestment of recent decades but the once thriving middle-class Black neighborhood of her childhood in the 1970s, where she would ride her bike past blocks and blocks of Black-owned businesses. Where guys on the corner “played saxophone on Friday night and rolled dice and made sure you got across the street correctly.”
“The hope is that we have a version of the East Oakland I remember,” said Johnson. “That there are no fences — there’s no need for them.”
Johnson is one of four neighborhood leaders spearheading an ambitious plan dubbed Rise East, which aims to revitalize a 40-by-40-block zone of deep East Oakland and reverse the tide of displacement that has imperiled its once flourishing community. Unlike previous philanthropic efforts in the area, this decade-long, $100 million initiative is largely led by the people it aims to serve, organizers say, an approach that, coupled with strategies to maintain local ownership of assets, sets Rise East apart. They see this initial investment as the beginning of a long-term transformation that could require up to $2 billion to fully realize their vision, which could act as a model for other neighborhoods across the country.
“Generations of Black people have shown that we can build communities and whether they’ve been burned down in a riot or a slow boil of destruction,” many of those neighborhoods have been destroyed beyond recognition, said Johnson, who sees efforts like Rise East as a model for community-level reparations or reinvestment in Black neighborhoods whose flourishing has been stunted by redlining and other discriminatory practices.
“We’re not asking for a handout — we’re asking for the ability to breathe and to live,” she said. “The work that we’re doing can save our city.”
The coalition behind Rise East has raised roughly $43 million of a $50 million goal that will then be matched with $50 million from Blue Meridian Partners, a national philanthropic funder. Using those funds, the Black Cultural Zone has purchased a building for a welcome center and is developing plans for a market hall and affordable housing, which will abut its Liberation Park, a community hub built over the ruins of an abandoned mall.
From Prosperity to Displacement
The planning process for Rise East began in 2022, and those initial investments kicked off this year, but the four core Black-led nonprofits behind the project — known as the 40x40 Council — say the true intellectual and relational groundwork behind the project began decades before.
From 1990 to 2020, Oakland’s Black population shrank from 163,526 to 93,820. Around a third of those who remain live in the 40x40, a patch of East Oakland that runs from Seminary Avenue to the Oakland-San Leandro border and from MacArthur Boulevard to the Bay. It is home to Oakland’s largest concentration of Black residents. Today, a child born in East Oakland faces a life expectancy 15 years lower than those from nearby neighborhoods just up the hill. East Oakland children are far more likely to grow up in poverty, miss school, read below grade level, or experience violence or housing insecurity than their peers elsewhere in the city.
Those worsening neighborhood conditions — driven largely by redlining and divestment, the crack epidemic, and poorly thought-out urban renewal projects — have led thousands of residents to flee, but they’ve also catalyzed unprecedented collaboration between community leaders committed to preserving East Oakland’s rich history and addressing the root causes behind its recent struggles.
In 2008, Noha Aboelata, an Oakland native, was working as a physician at a community health center in the 40x40, when she noticed that residents with the highest health needs rarely sought treatment.
“The people I was most worried about weren’t necessarily walking in the door,” said Aboelata. She founded a two-person volunteer mobile clinic that could meet the most vulnerable patients where they were — for example, at substance use rehabs or re-entry facilities, while also attempting to understand the roots of the neighborhood’s health disparities.
That mobile clinic has since bloomed into Roots Community Health, a comprehensive health care nonprofit with about 250 full-time staff dedicated to addressing the root causes of health disparities. Many of these, Aboelata says, “are directly related to poverty itself and to so many of the structural barriers that have been put in place over generations.”
To avoid duplicating existing neighborhood services, Roots began collaborating closely with other local nonprofits, culminating in 2019 with what would become the 40x40 Council, anchored by three other groups deeply rooted in East Oakland: the Black Cultural Zone, East Oakland Youth Development Center, and Brotherhood of Elders Network. Since the launch of Rise East, Roots Community Health has secured a long-term lease on a closed school site to create a work force development hub, while the youth development center has launched a summer tech internship program paying teens up to $5,000.
“We can’t program and service our way out of things,” said Aboelata, who noted that wide collaboration was necessary to remedy the 40x40’s urgent needs, which came into even starker clarity during the Covid-19 pandemic. “We’re going to have to address some of the structures that got us here in the first place.”
Homegrown Solutions
Around that time, Oakland Thrives, a public-private partnership between the Oakland-based health care company Kaiser Permanente and the city of Oakland, sought support from Blue Meridian Partners to explore a 10-year plan to improve economic mobility for families in East Oakland.
The 40x40 Council became a natural fit for the project “having already organized as a set of powerful leaders giving voice to a lot of the key issues” in East Oakland, says Melanie Moore, CEO of Oakland Thrives. While the 40x40 Council has taken charge of building a vision and implementing the $100 million plan, Oakland Thrives has come to act as a backbone for Rise East, focusing on analysis, planning, and fundraising — including securing the $50 million commitment from Blue Meridian Partners.
“When the community gets to design this themselves, that sense of ownership and that sense of autonomy going forward is so powerful and kind of irreplaceable,” said Moore. The 10-year Rise East plan allocates funds across five key investment areas: education and youth development, community safety and wellness, housing stability and affordability, economic opportunity and work force development, and health and family well-being.
Additional philanthropy to reach the $50 million has come from a mixture of regional and national philanthropies, including the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the San Francisco Foundation, and the PG&E Corporation Foundation
East Oakland’s middle-class roots are “not a distant past,” says Brandi Howard, head of the East Bay Community Foundation, one of the initiative’s supporters, who praised the “comprehensive and actually community-led” ethos behind Rise East. She emphasized that it would take continuous collaboration from nonprofits, philanthropy, and the public and private sectors to resurrect the “thriving community” of the ‘60s and ‘70s.
A Different Approach
This isn’t the first time a major philanthropic effort has come to East Oakland. In 2010, the California Endowment embarked on a 10-year $1 billion initiative called Building Healthy Communities (BHC) in 14 places across the state, including East Oakland. In some ways, say organizers, the end of BHC in East Oakland was the beginning of the collaborative work that led to Rise East, with Roots Community Health acting as a fiscal sponsor for BHC in its final years.
Yet the funding and planning structure that undergirds Rise East differs significantly from its predecessor, organizers say. In its assessment of Building Healthy Communities, the California Endowment admitted that its early investments were at times overly prescriptive, eschewing local leadership for a more top-down funder-led approach.
Eventually, BHC took several midcourse corrections to better embrace the leadership of local organizations, a lesson that Rise East has embraced from its inception. The initiative was also inspired and advised by Geoffrey Canada, who spearheaded the Harlem Children’s Zone’s expansive community-driven work to disrupt the intergenerational poverty in New York’s Harlem.
“In other cases, a funder will come in, there will be a grant opportunity put on the table, and then people organize themselves around the resources, not the relationships,” said Gregory Hodge, CEO of the Brotherhood of Elders Network, founded over a decade ago in the 40x40. “These were pre-existing relationships that were the basis for the partnership.”
Initial Investments
Those long-term community ties have colored how the 40x40 Council has spent the money raised so far — about $43 million — as it continues to raise the remaining $7 million. If outside philanthropists often get distracted by shiny new ideas or data-driven techniques, these local organizers say they have a keen awareness of the more practical East Oakland-specific snags that stand in the way of long-term prosperity.
“Philanthropy will often get invested in various ideas, but they often miss some of the necessary but perhaps less glamorous kind of investments that need to be made to allow that thing to work,” said Selena Wilson, CEO of the East Oakland Youth Development Center.
For example, says Wilson, a funder interested in promoting literacy might help implement an innovative new teaching tool at the local public school, but “if kids aren’t making it to school in the first place, how are they going to receive that intervention?”
Transportation barriers or a lack of child care for younger siblings can make it difficult for families to get their students to school on time, but underlying infrastructure and support may not get funded “if that’s not what’s exciting to philanthropy this five minutes,” she says.
That attention to underlying infrastructure is part of what Rise East’s organizers hope will set it apart. A significant portion of the funds — $25 million — is earmarked for real estate acquisition, aiming to preserve community ownership and prevent further displacement.
Beyond $100 Million
Looking ahead, the initiative’s leaders are already thinking beyond the initial $100 million investment. Around half of the total funds raised will go toward improving collective resources — like building a community data hub — while strengthening the four organizations that make up the 40x40 Council as part of an effort to strengthen their ability to see through the revitalization of East Oakland for the long haul.
“A hundred million sounds like it’s a lot, but it will go quickly,” says Yvette Radford, vice president for external and community affairs for Kaiser Permanente Northern California, which has committed $5.2 million to Rise East since Spring 2023
“Some of the issues that exist did not happen overnight and so are not going to get solved overnight. We’re going to be able to show some really strong and important results, but it’s not going to happen immediately.”
As Rise East moves forward, its leaders hope it can serve as a model for similar community-led initiatives across the country. They see their work not just as neighborhood revitalization but as a blueprint for preserving and strengthening Black communities nationwide.
“It sounds crazy now, but when I told people that Liberation Park, which was an old rundown lot, ... would be a roller skating rink, they thought it was crazy then too,” said Johnson. “So, we are going to shock the world.”
