In October 2018, The Village, The East Oakland Collective and Just Cities released the report Housing Oakland’s Unhoused. Two weeks later, The Village and The East Oakland Collective created a clean and sober village for unhoused women with families in Brookfield. We named it Housing and Dignity Village. It was everything us residents and the surrounding community needed. The city spent thousands to bulldoze Housing and Dignity Village days before Christmas, leaving us on the sidewalk with no shelter, no food, no water, no supplies to survive.
In March 2025, The Village and The East Oakland Collective were invited to work with Just Cities Institute, and The Triangle (representatives from Allen Temple Baptist Church, Brotherhood of Elders) to work efforts to create a human rights based solution to homelessness. The Housing Oakland’s Unhoused report was agreed upon as a framework to advocate for solutions.
We had a joint meeting with Mayor Barbara Lee and Alameda County Supervisor Nikki Fortunata Bas to ask for the sweeps of encampments to end and for the city to invest in real solutions and a human rights approach. We asked for the city to open public lands for people to go to until until longterm and permanent solutions were in place. We continue to advocate for this, as nearly 3/4 of Oakland shelters closed March 2026 while sweeps, tows and demolitions attempt to make Oakland’s unhoused disappear. We also advocated for the City and County to create a formal partnership towards solving the homeless crisis, dedicating specific tasks to be the point people in each jurisdiction.
Over the summer 2025, the project grew to include Wood Street Commons, Cardea Health, Love & Justice in the Streets, and Oakland Revealed. We adopted the name Housing and Dignity Project. The team spent months grounded in the wisdom of lived experience and frontline advocates to develop a human rights pipeline from homelessness into intergenerational permanent housing.
In August we joined advocates and unhoused residents across Alameda County to advocate that Measure W funds be used as voters intended: to fund homeless prevention and services. We met with Supervisor Nikki Fortunata Bas to advocate for a human rights framework to be adopted for Measure W funds – which she successfully advocated for and got passed.
From August til April 2026, we have educated, mobilized and advocated against Ken Houston’s and Kevin Jenkin’s chief of staff proposed Encampment Abatement Policy (EAP). We were able to meet with Council members Houston, Jenkins, Unger, Brown, and Chang to advocate for an evidence based policy that would actually end homelessness instead of criminalizing and further traumatizing or even killing the unhoused.
We continue to mobilize and advocate against the EAP and we continue to advocate and work towards creating real, cost effective solutions to homelessness rooted in human rights and public health.