The Village is a direct action that became a movement that is moving towards becoming a housing development agency & non profit service provider.
The idea is simple and as ancient as human history – it takes The Village. Currently, we are a network of seasoned community activists, unhoused leaders, grassroots and non-profit leaders, and housed allies. Up until this point we have been driven thru 100% volunteerism and 100% community donations. But as our vision (and the political climate) becomes a reality, the depth and scope of work points to a need for sustainability and establishing a solid foundation so that housing security can be gained for generations to come. We realize that creating full and part time salaried positions and solidifying funding sources is a necessity. We provide food, provisions, advocacy, protection, defense and temporary housing on public and private land for Oakland’s curbside communities. We assert, ensure, protect, advocate and co-create basic needs and rights of Oakland residents who have fallen victim of the housing crisis and homeless state of emergency.
Goals
To Use Public and Private Land So We Can Provided Temporary Emergency Shelters, Services, Jobs/Job Training, and a Pathway Towards Self-Sufficiency and Permanent Housing to Oakland’s Unsheltered During This Shelter Crisis Declaration: We currently have been offered a one acre plot of City-owned land to allow us to construct a model pilot of well-run, safe, community run encampments. We are currently negotiating several more public and privately owned plots throughout Oakland as well.
Create Transitional Supportive Housing in a Holistic Space and Path Towards Self-Sufficiency: The entire design is based on proven practices that build life skills, develop leadership, offer job training, ensure peaceful co-habitation, promote restorative justice, prioritize holistic health and well-being, focus on goal setting, support with sobriety and practice self-governance. Our practices are also in line with human rights law and the United Nations human rights framework and recommendations for addressing the homeless crisis.
Create Job Training, Job Opportunities and Micro-Businesses for Self-Employment to Prevent and End Homelessness. There has been an influx of jobs pouring into Oakland and the greater Bay Area. Unfortunately those jobs are not going to residents born and raised in Oakland. Whether it be lack of job training, a deficit of local outreach to the Oaklanders, or discrimination – not having access to this wave of employment is directly linked to not having access to this inflated housing market. How can Oakland’s working class and lower income communities afford the raising cost of living if they cannot access the jobs that will support the new economic culture of their homeland? Thru careful analysis of the economic climate coupled with extended surveys to the unsheltered, we realize that in order to achieve self-sufficiency and secure adequate permanent housing being players in a competitive job market is part of the solution to preventing and ending homelessness. For that reason we are partnering with existing job training and placement programs, creating a tiny house manufacturing company, and creating micro-business incubators for residents of The Village.
Create Permanent Housing To Prevent and End Homelessness. The City of Oakland has repeatedly told us that they do not have the capacity to provide permanent housing to all of Oakland’s unsheltered. The development agencies we have approached to provide permanent homes are not interested in building housing that will not turn them a profit. So we will also embark on utilizing the Statewide Shelter Crisis Ordinance signed into law December 2017 to build alternative models for permanent homes for our Village residents.We currently have investors we are working with to embark on this endeavor and in partnership with The Dellums Institute For Social Justice, Goldman Sachs Institute of Policy Research and The East Oakland Collective we have created a comprehensive report that outline how we can permanently house 2,000 curbside residents in the next 6 months.
Create and advocate policies and solutions that will decrminalize homelessness, improve the quality of life of our unhoused neighbors and assert and protect housing as a human right for all.
We believe that using a diversity of tactics to reach our goals is necessary in the current political, economic and historic moment we are in: direct action and policy reform; adverse possession and purchasing lands; reparations and self-determination; serve the unsheltered and self-governance of unsheltered. We assert housing is a human right, that there are enough public resources to house all Oakland residents, and that homelessness is not a crime.
“Nowhere Else to Go”: Housing and Dignity Village Encampment & Service Center Led by Unhoused Women of Color Faces Eviction FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Oakland, CA – The City of Oakland has posted an eviction notice at Housing and Dignity Village (HDV), an encampment that shelters 13 unhoused Oakland residents of color in deep East Oakland. …
#HousingAndDignityVillage needs court support MONDAY 11/26 at 3 pm. Come through for a hearing in our case against Libby Schaaf and Joe DeVries, her czar of homelessness! The Village is arguing in federal court that the City of Oakland violates the constitutional rights of unhoused people – a win that could help thousands of unhoused …
U.N. REPORT OF THE SPECIAL RAPPORTEUR ON ADEQUATE HOUSING AS A COMPONENT OF THE RIGHT TO AN ADEQUATE STANDARD OF LIVING, AND ON THE RIGHT TO NON-DISCRIMINATION IN THIS CONTEXT Promotion and protection of human rights: human rights questions, including alternative approaches for improving the effective enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms . Note …
The Housing & Dignity Project is an alliance between The Village, The East Oakland Collective and The Dellums Institute For Social Justice. Together we aim to:
use existing public resources and private resources to temporarily house 1,200 curbside residents in 6-8 self-governed Villages by Spring 2019
use existing public resources and private resources to permanently house 2,000 curbside residents in the next 6 months
support the passing of a community driven, comprehensive public lands policy
create an alternative tax stream that taps into the new wealth that has come into Oakland and use that tax steam to house curbside communities
change the narrative around the new face of homelessness created by the development agenda known as gentrification
to donate to our collaborative effort THE HOUSING & DIGNITY PROJECT please go here:
Organizers of the First Annual Housing Oakland Now! Fundraiser’s Public Statement on The New Parish Former Owner’s Abuse of Homeless Residents
Oakland, CA — On June 24, 2018, 3-9 PM, The Village, The East Oakland Collective, Dellums Institute for Social Justice, Gina Madrid and Equipto will be hosting a star studded benefit concert as the first annual fundraiser for grassroots organizations The Village and The East Oakland Collective’s on the ground and in the trenches work. Both these organizations tirelessly advocate and serve on behalf of Oakland’s unhoused brothers and sisters to provide housing, address hunger, bring dignity and implement immediate and long term permanent solutions to Oakland’s housing and homelessness crisis. The event will be hosted at the popular venue, The New Parish.
Recent news stories and media have brought to light disturbing allegations against Jason Perkins, a former partner of Parish Entertainment Group, who controls The New Parish. The allegations against Jason Perkins are for the gross mistreatment of unhoused persons in San Francisco and Oakland — allegations that we demand be fully investigated by the proper authorities. These allegations are contrary to the work of The Village, The East Oakland Collective and Dellums Institute for Social Justice are doing to change the narrative on homelessness– efforts to share the many lived experiences of our unhoused brothers and sisters, eradicate the stereotypes on who is homeless and why people are unhoused, and ultimately decriminalize homelessness and frame it as a human rights crisis.
From the actions of Henry Sintay “Jogger Joe” at Lake Merritt to the allegations of Jason Perkins in San Francisco, now more than ever, is the time for community members to join us in changing the narrative on homelessness and unite against the mistreatment, stereotypes and criminalization of our unhoused brothers and sisters. After investigating and learning that Perkins is no longer with the New Parish, we decided not to move the first annual fundraiser from The New Parish venue, but instead ask the community to support this cause, join our efforts and most importantly, unite with us to change the narrative! We will pack the venue with our unhoused brothers and sisters, advocates, activists and community members– bringing our collective energy and demands to The New Parish.
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Housing Oakland Now! is the kick off campaign and first annual fundraiser for the collaboration between The Village and The East Oakland Collective. We organize housed and unhoused residents in Oakland to come together for the goal of implementing immediate emergency and long term permanent solutions to the housing and homeless crisis in Oakland. We overstand that that the agenda of gentrification has wrongfully used Oakland’s public resources to create the housing and homeless state of emergency and massive human rights violations. This agenda needs to end and public resources such as land, funds and labor must be used to house Oakland’s displaced Black and Brown poor and working class communities.
What Does The Village Do?
We work in service and support with some encampments.
Other encampments we work in partnership with.
We promote mutual-aid (aka sharing) and unity building between encampments.
We build partnerships, alliances, and coalitions with other organizations to assert and ensure that our unsheltered brothers and sisters basic needs are met with respect and dignity.
We show solidarity and support with First Response efforts during crisis and evictions.
We engage in education, advocacy and policy work to decriminalize homelessness.
We defend and assert housing, shelter and safety is a human right that all should have access to.
We share meals with folks.
We have, maintain or build personal relationships with our displaced friends, families, neighbors and community.
We engage in direct action. We see that for curbside communities there is a thin line between survival, the right to exist and direct action. We assert that curbside communities have far more to lose in a direct action than housed communities. We believe it is the duty of our housed folks to join our curbside brothers and sisters on the direct action frontline.
How Do we do this?
We function in committees of volunteers.
We build and activate a broad base network of organizations and institutions.
We are fueled primarily thru volunteers, in-kind donations, community donations, monthly patrons, anonymous donors, and occasionally small grants.
What do we want to do in the future?
We want long term, adequate, and dignified emergency housing. Cuz homelessness isn’t going away anytime soon.
We want immediate deeply affordable permanent housing. Because that is the only solution to this housing affordability crisis, to this homeless state of emergency, and to ensuring housing is a human right – not a privilege.
We want training and jobs for Oakland’s working class and poor in these foodie, techie and hub industries. So much money is coming into Oakland for The New Oakland. But Oakland’s wealth of innovative, brilliant working class Black and Brown communities does not have access to this incoming flow of cash. That needs to change.
Photo & Video Gallery
Two Three Hunid Tent City
in October 2017 after8months of advocating the City administration gave us land in East Oakland on e12 and 23rd. but the administration operated in ill faith. rather than allow us to move forward obstacle after obstacle was laid in our path. people were herded against their will on the land without any notice to us and threatened with arrest if they attempted to leave – including rival gangs and families with generation old beef. Folks did not choose to be on the land and were not interested in going into recovery. we had moments where we were able to build a fragile unity between the encampment of residents that at it’s largest was 100 deep. We spent most of the year on the land dealing with crisis after crisis, keeping people from killing each other and chasing off predators. We built six homes to house 11 people – senior citizens and a woman with a child, advocated for adequate sanitation services the to date have remained unmet, made sure folks on the land had food & water, and provided support as necessary for folks individual needs.
In the end, the land should have never been offered to us as it was CalTrans not City owned. CalTran was unaware that we even were offered the land. Cal Trans intends to edit us this January 2019 to retrofit the overpass that spans the parcel an the administration is in the process of offering us new parcels to manifest our vision correctly and without sabatoge.
Volunteers Juan Perez, center, and Tom Waters, right, work on a ramp entrance for a new temporary home at the Village homeless encampment on Sunday, March 25, 2018, in Oakland, Calif. The city sanctioned encampment is set to shut down in November due to retrofitting of a nearby freeway on-ramp. (Aric Crabb/Bay Area News Group)
Bobby Quinones helps wheel Barbara Verduzco out of the new temporary home she will share with her husband Charlie Griffin, right, at the Village homeless encampment on Sunday, March 25, 2018, in Oakland, Calif. The city sanctioned encampment is set to shut down in November due to retrofitting of a nearby freeway on-ramp. (Aric Crabb/Bay Area News Group)
Brent Shipp, right, brushes a treatment on wood banisters for a new temporary home at the Village homeless encampment on Sunday, March 25, 2018, in Oakland, Calif. The city sanctioned encampment is set to shut down in November due to retrofitting of a nearby freeway on-ramp. (Aric Crabb/Bay Area News Group)
They tried to burry us….
From The day we were bulldozed to present day The Village had advocated or the legalities of their actions and vision, the human rights of curbside communities, a decriminalization of homelessness, the need for permanent houses and that existing encampments be upgraded and supported not criminalize, ignored or evicted.
Long time Oakland activist and organizer Brother Ali speaks up in support of The Village at Oakland City Council meeting
allies and members of The Village attend city council meeting regularly to avocate for or curbside communities
Feed The People Member Chi advocates for The Village at City Council meeting
The Village and other community organizations and curbside residents disrupt a developers conference that mayor Libby Schaft speaks at.Libby tells developers that Oakland is the East Bay jewel ready to be sold to highest bidder.
The Village and other community organizations and curbside residents disrupt a developers conference that mayor Libby Schaft speaks at.Libby tells developers that Oakland is the East Bay jewel ready to be sold to highest bidder. Community members protest, flier and set up tents to make he connection between money driver market rate development and displacement thetas forcing thousands of Oakland’s families into the streets.
homeless advocates share solutions tot he the homeless state of emergency to government officials. there needs to be at least 100 different solutions to solve this problem as thee is not one cookie cutter solution that will meet the needs and experiences of the thousands of Oakland’s curbside residents.
sometimes advocacy means showing up to encampment evictions at 8am to support curbside residents moving, standing their ground and refusing to leave, documenting human rights and civil rights abuses, and negotiating with police and city workers. This show of support can last all day into the early evening but showing up makes a world of difference. if you want to be part of the community’s First Response efforts text HOMESNOW to 797979 to recieve our community calls to action.
showing up to court case for criminalized curbside residents is another form of advocacy
demanding that public lands be used to build permanent emergency housing and temporary emergency housing is part of our work too. unfortunately the government does not have the political will to do so. which is why direct action always gets the goods.
passing out provisions to encampments is another form of work we engage in
in january2018 we were able to co-host the United Nations Rapaetour on Adequate housing. she was working on a 6 year reaseh of “informal settlements” or homeless folks around the world. she said what she saw here in the Bay Area was more cruel and inhumane than what she saw in some of the poorest countries in the world. On Oct 19 2018 she released her report. she asserted that the existence of encampments where not on human rights abuses on the hands of governments unable or unwilling to provide the basic human right of housing to all their residents while at the same Tim the assertion of those denied housing the right to housing. she said the encampments where testaments of resilience and ingenuity in the most dire of circumstances. she also stated homeless was not a crime, that encampments should be upgraded not evicted, and that residents of encampments needed to be part of every step of the upgrade process. she set out a list of recommendations f government to follow and The Village program design created two years earlier is in line with those recommendations.
The Bulldozing of The Promised Land
Feb 2, 2017
City workers clear a homeless encampment at Grove Shafter Park on Martin Luther King Jr. Way in Oakland, Calif., on Thursday, Feb. 2, 2017. The city cleared the camp, which has been there for about a week, citing health and sanitary violations. (Jane Tyska/Bay Area News Group)
A homeless man sits with his belongings in front of Grove Shafter Park on Martin Luther King Jr. Way in Oakland, Calif., on Thursday, Feb. 2, 2017. The city cleared a homeless encampment which has been at the park for about a week, citing health and sanitary violations. (Jane Tyska/Bay Area News Group)
A homeless man sits along Martin Luther King Jr. Way near Grove Shafter Park in Oakland, Calif., on Thursday, Feb. 2, 2017. The city cleared a homeless encampment which has been at the park for about a week, citing health and sanitary violations. (Jane Tyska/Bay Area News Group)
village founder needa bee comforts village resident mama nancy who was snatched out of her home and watched it bulldozed.
villahe volunteer rae sits with village resident mama nancy in the aftermath of the bulldozing. mama nancy and all the other 15 residents were displaced back on the streets, where they continue to live today
before shutting down the portapotty service the vilage organized comunity to pay for, the police used the service
community showed up as early as 6am in an attempt to block the eviction and demolition. but 80 violent cops in full riot gear and a bulldozer were n match for the 150 people there.
as community attempts to pack and slavage what they can, police take over the property
community watches as police and public works destroy the village
members of the community put their bodies on the line to defend the village. this brother is standing in defense of the health & wellness tent
what remains of the 24 hour kitchen
bear was not a resident but he is one of the hundreds of unsheltered folks who utilized the services provided at the village
police and public works swarmped the village. here they are standing around after yanking elders out of the homes community built.
how much of your tax dollars are being spent in this picture
community scrambled to collect materilas while the bulldozing happened…they may have tried to stop us but we had no intention of giving up
unfortunately the police and city administration on mayor do nt agree with this statement
a comunity member takes a break with her baby in the midst of the mayhem
community and residents trying to figure out where will the residents go now? sadly they all went back to the streets.
The First Village
Jan 20, 2017 – February 2, 2017
The First Village was located atMarcus Garvey Park in West Oakland. the Direct Action lasted for 13 days. From Jn 20, 2017 to Feb 2, 2017. we housed 16 residents who were chronicly homeless and addict. all 16 were sober during the two weeks we existed. we offered several services that were available free of charge and hundreds of curbside residents and housed residents in need utilize them. word of the village spread across curbside communities throughout Oakland and even Berkeley. Unsheltered folks called it “The Promised Land” because community activists and advocates kept promises to their unsheltered neighbors, unlike city officials
The first Village: The Promised Land at Marcus Garvey Park
J20 – move in night. on january 20, 2017 while the rest of the world braced itself for the inauguration of Donald Trump as the president of the United States, Feed The People & Asians For Black Lives and allies of both organizations came together in the middle of the night to seize mismanaged and neglected public land. Under the camafloge of the hardest rainstrom of the year, 100 comrades and homies moved in three hoes and a hnadfuk of residents. thus began day one of the 13 day direct action.
