Calendar
Open Circle, first and foremost, is an opportunity to build community with one another. Secondly, it is a space to reflect and collaborate on strategies and actions to bring an end to these egregious crimes.
Please join us for the Potluck at 3:00 pm followed by the Open Circle at 3:45 pm. Please bring a dish or snacks to share!
Open circle will begin with speakers who have lost their loved ones to police violence, followed by reflection and dialogue around the current state and thoughts or approaches on how to effect change. Then report backs and announcements for upcoming events.
We will end with working groups to organize and plan next steps in the struggle.
Solidarity is afoot so bring your ideas!
Come learn about continuing developments in the battle save the Berkeley Post Office and the Postal Service from privatization, support our Occupiers and help us plan our next steps in opposition to the theft of our public commons.
The postal service wanted to sell the post office to Hudson-Mcdonald, a local developer. The City of Berkeley sued the post office to stop the sale. Hudson-Mcdonald backed out of the deal in early December.
There was a hearing in Federal Court on December 11th. There was another hearing in March 26th. Federal Judge William Alsup decided to dismiss the lawsuit because the Postal Service says it is not currently selling the building. But we’re not fooled. The Postal Service could “find” a buyer at any moment. Fortunately, the Judge ordered the Postal Service to provide 42 days notice before any sale, so that the lawsuit could be refiled.
Check out our response to the Judge’s order.
Check out the Community Garden at the Post Office.
Also check out our website and the Save the Berkeley Post Office website, and First they Came for the Homeless Facebook for updates.
BPOD is an offshoot of Strike Debt Bay Area, which itself is an offshoot of Occupy Oakland and a chapter of the national Strike Debt movement, which is an offshoot of Occupy Wall Street.
OptikAllusions is a digital filmmaking collective dedicated to social change, based in Oakland, California. We share resources, skills and knowledge to help each other tell stories that might otherwise remain untold. We make films in a spirit of collaboration and solidarity, share a lending library of film equipment for creative projects, organize free, at cost or donation-based workshops.
If you’d like to make videos or want to become a member, join us for our weekly meeting and a workshop!
We usually, meet briefly and then work on projects. It’s open to all!
https://omnicommons.org/wiki/Optik_Allusions
The Oscar Grant Committee Against Police Brutality & State Repression (OGC) is a grassroots democratic organization that was formed as a conscious united front for justice against police brutality. The OGC is involved in the struggle for police accountability and is committed to stopping police brutality. In alliance with the International Longshore & Warehouse Union (ILWU) we organized the October 23, 2010 labor and community rally for Justice for Oscar Grant. On that day the ILWU shut down the Bay Area ports in solidarity.
Our mission is to educate, organize and mobilize people against police and state repression.
Sisters and brothers the Oscar Grant Committee invites you to join us in this vital struggle.
The Oscar Grant Committee meets on the 1st Tuesday of each month.
Every 1st Wed of the Month @ the Omni.
The Bay Area Community Exchange (BACE) Timebank promotes and facilitates the use of Time instead of money in the exchange of goods and services.
The foundation of the Timebank is a free, open source online directory, reputation and accounting system.
These exchanges help develop stronger, more resilient connections between individuals and community service organizations which participate in them, by improving communication and the distribution of skills and resources among our participants. We work to help people meet their needs regardless of economic status.
Please join our Meetup Group:
And our timebank at:
http://www.bace.org
Our streets have been stolen from us, our rights have been stolen from us, our PEOPLE have been stolen from us. It is time to take them back!
It is unconstitutional to repress our right to hold space in the very place that was built on the backs of our ancestors. We’ve been told too many times that we don’t belong here: through the over-policing and criminalization of our communities, through the militarization of the police force, through gentrification, through unlawful curfews and state sanctioned violence against our communities.
The new curfew imposed on our people IS NOT going to stop us from holding space in the streets that BELONG TO US!
Black people and allies, it is time to come together and take back what rightfully belongs to us.
This Friday (1st Friday) we plan to #BreakTheCurfew! We will be meeting at Oscar Grant Plaza and marching…
Please bring:
A scarf or handkerchief
Earplugs
More details to come…
Note: A recent callout suggests meeting at 19th & Telegraph. See below.
#Fuckthecurfew #Fuckyoursummit AKA We also revolt in the day! #SUNBLOC
The morning after the #fuckthecurfew march the city is hosting “The 2015 Oakland Summit” where “Mayor Libby Schaaf and Chief of police Sean Whent will share their vision of Oakland through “Community Policing”
We are strongly opposed to their “vision of Oakland” and seek to abolish the police as well as the state. As an alternative we hope to organize our hoods to build community and push out the police who have always brutalized us.
The People will gather 9 AM at Lake Merritt Amphitheater VS
The Pigs will Gather at 9 AM at Laney College 900 Fallon St.
Either march with us or go #shutitdown from the inside!
For some reason Libby Schaff thinks she can erase the black and brown radical tradition from Oakland. She thinks she can erase black and brown militants from the streets. LITTLE DID SHE KNOW SHE CAN’T! We will resist and revolt in the day as we always have.
ART PARTY & MEETING
Preparations for Conference of Mayors – Let’s make our presence visible with creative ART!
12Noon – 2:00pm ART
2:00pm – 4:00pm MEETING
4:00pm – 6:00pm ART
All Are Welcome!
San Francisco is hosting the 83rd Annual Conference of Mayors June 19th, 2015 – June 22nd.. Around 250 Mayors will be in attendance. This is an opportunity to raise issues locally and nationally that are of concern to us.
- Black Lives Matter
- Gentrification
- Homelessness
- Privatization
- Homophobia and Transphobia
- Immigration
- The Environment
- Corporate Greed
- Wars not People
All are welcome to help plan for actions.
The Occupy Oakland General Assembly meets Sundays at 4 PM at Oscar Grant Plaza amphitheatre at 14th Street & Broadway, often on the steps of City Hall. If it is raining (as in RAINING, not just misting) at 4:00 PM we meet in the basement of the Omni Collective, 4799 Shattuck Ave., Oakland
OO General A
ssembly has met on a continuous basis for more than three years! Our General Assembly is a participatory gathering of Oakland community members and beyond, where everyone who shows up is treated equally . Our Assembly and the process we have collectively cultivated strives to reach agreement while building community.
At the GA committees, caucuses, and loosely associated groups whose representatives come voluntarily report on past and future actions, with discussion. We encourage everyone participating in the Occupy Oakland GA to be part of at least one associated group, but it is by no means a requirement. If you like, just come and hear all the organizing being done! Occupy Oakland encourages political activity that is decentralized and welcomes diverse voices and actions into the movement.
General Assembly Standard Agenda
- Welcome & Introductions
- Reports from Committees, Caucuses, & Independent Organizations
- Announcements
- (Optional) Discussion Topic
Occupy Oakland activities and contact info for some Bay Area Groups with past or present Occupy Oakland members.
Occupy Oakland Web Committee: (web@occupyoakland.org)
Occupy Oakland Kitchen Committee: (kitchen@occupyoakland.org)
Strike Debt Bay Area : strikedebtbayarea.tumblr.com
Berkeley Post Office Defenders:http://berkeleypostofficedefenders.wordpress.com/
Alan Blueford Center 4 Justice:https://www.facebook.com/ABC4JUSTICE
Oakland Privacy Working Group:https://oaklandprivacy.wordpress.com
Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity: prisonerhungerstrikesolidarity.wordpress.com/
Bay Area AntiRepression: antirepression@occupyoakland.org
Biblioteca Popular: http://tinyurl.com/mdlzshy
Interfaith Tent: www.facebook.com/InterfaithTent
Port Truckers Solidarity: oaklandporttruckers.wordpress.com
Bay Area Intifada: bayareaintifada.wordpress.com
Transport Workers Solidarity: www.transportworkers.org
Fresh Juice Party (aka Chalkupy) freshjuiceparty.com/chalkupy-gallery
Sudo Room: https://sudoroom.org
Omni Collective: https://omnicommons.org/
First They Came for the Homeless: https://www.facebook.com/pages/First-they-came-for-the-homeless/253882908111999
Sunflower Alliance: http://www.sunflower-alliance.org/
Bay Area Public School: http://thepublicschool.org/bay-area
San Francisco based groups:
Occupy Bay Area United: www.obau.org
Occupy Forum: (see OBAU above)
San Francisco Projection Department: http://tinyurl.com/kpvb3rv
The Oakland Livable Wage Assembly builds community and power among those who seek higher wages and better work life conditions for area workers.
We meet every 2nd and 4th Tuesday of the month at the SEIU Local 1000 union hall in downtown Oakland at 6:30 PM.
Our work together encompasses: (1) the concerns of precarious, contingent, and care workers; (2) current campaigns to improve wages for low-wage workers; and (3) efforts by unionized workers and unions to improve wages and quality of work life. We share stories and information in an egalitarian and participatory way to build relationships and build the movement.
We look forward to learning with you and making change for the better.
Please love and support one another. We have a duty to fight. We have a duty to win.
OptikAllusions is a digital filmmaking collective dedicated to social change, based in Oakland, California. We share resources, skills and knowledge to help each other tell stories that might otherwise remain untold. We make films in a spirit of collaboration and solidarity, share a lending library of film equipment for creative projects, organize free, at cost or donation-based workshops.
If you’d like to make videos or want to become a member, join us for our weekly meeting and a workshop!
We usually, meet briefly and then work on projects. It’s open to all!
https://omnicommons.org/wiki/Optik_Allusions
Fight for a city budget that puts communities and workers first.
We are a group of labor, housing, racial and social justice advocates that believes the Oakland City Council should pass a budget that reflects the needs of our communities. We fight alongside working people throughout the East Bay.
8:00 AM: Telegraph & MacArthur Blvd. Join tenats to demand the city reinvest in Healthy Housing.
11:00 AM: Oakland City Hall. Justice for low-wage workers! Join fast food workers and community members calling on the City to enforce the Minimum Wage.
3:30 PM: Oakland City Hall. Reinvest in Public Services. Join residents as they call on the City to reinvest resources to fix our roads and address illegal dumping in the flatlands.
4:30 PM: Oakland City Hall steps. Press Event to call for a Budget that Reinvests in Oakland.
7:00 PM: 14th & Broadway, Oscar Grant Plaza. Take back our streets! The new curfew can’t stop us from holding space in the streets.
What do we DEMAND???
Reinvesting in Tenants & Housing: Enforcing the Tenant Protection Ordinance & adequately staffing city housing inspectors
Reinvesting in Workers: Enforcing Minimum Wage & Paid Sick Days & making sure there are resources for the city’s most vulnerable workers including fast food and day laborers
Reinvesting in Equity: Supporting the creation of a Department of Race & Equity
Reinvesting in Public Services: Ensuring that flatland communities get the services they need by working toward a fair contract that gives our city workers the pay, rights & respect they deserve
Reinvesting in responsible development: Public land for the public good & ensuring that communities benefit from the rise in development taking place in our city
Background on ReFund Oakland:
The ReFund & ReBuild Oakland Community-Labor Coalition representing over 15 labor, community and faith groups has been focused on building a broad based agenda to ensure big banks, large corporations and our elected officials reinvest in working families, communities of color and neighborhoods impacted by inequity, displacement and underrepresentation.
In 2013 ReFund groups came together and, alongside a 1 day strike organized by city unions, helped to push a budget that prioritized public services and an agenda that reinvested in working class families and communities of color across the city.
The Berkeley PD chief will present the police department’s “post-incident review of events of December 2014.”
This is an important meeting for the public to attend. It will be the first disclosure, after six months, of the police narrative of their response to the Black Lives Matter demonstrations.
Note: the meeting will begin at 6pm instead of its usual 7pm starting time to allow more time for public comment and for commissioners to question the chief.
Our streets have been stolen from us, our rights have been stolen from us, our PEOPLE have been stolen from us. It is time to take them back!
It is unconstitutional to repress our right to hold space in the very place that was built on the backs of our ancestors. We’ve been told too many times that we don’t belong here: through the over-policing and criminalization of our communities, through the militarization of the police force, through gentrification, through unlawful curfews and state sanctioned violence against our communities.
The new curfew imposed on our people IS NOT going to stop us from holding space in the streets that BELONG TO US!
Black people and allies, it is time to come together and take back what rightfully belongs to us.
BYP100 Bay Area Chapter, in solidarity with Just Cause’s #OurBudgetOurCity day of action, Black Lives Matter (Bay Area), ONYX, BlackOUT Collective and Black Seed, will take back the streets that WE pay for, the streets that belong to US!
#OurBudgetOurCity is a day demonstrating the priorities that the City can spend their money and resources on – the needs of Oakland’s residents! Oakland’s public officials prioritize the profit-driven interests of developers, investors, big landlords, and protecting windows more than protecting the interests of Oakland’s working class and low income communities.
It’s clear that those of us whose needs are not being met and who are being displaced, suffering from the impact of gentrification, and living under the threat of state violence are not taking it anymore. The Bay Area has been blazing with people all over standing up to take back the rights that we have. June 10th is a day to celebrate all of that, and to show the Mayor, the City Council that we are united in our fight against gentrification and that we demand that our voices and demands be heard.
Take a look at the schedule of actions below.
8 AM: Join tenants to demand the city reinvest in Healthy Housing!
Location: Corner of Telegraph Ave. and West Macarthur Blvd.
11 AM: Justice for low-wage workers! Join fast food workers & community members calling on the City to enforce the Minimum Wage!
Location: Oakland City Hall
3:30 PM: ReInvest in Public Services! Join residents as they call on the City to reinvest resources to fix our roads and address illegal dumping in the flatlands! Location: Oakland City Hall
4:30pm: Press Event @ the Steps of Oakland City Hall to call for a Budget that ReInvests in Oakland!
7 PM: Take back our streets! The new curfew can’t stop us from holding space in the streets
Location: 14th and Broadway.
Please come out and show your solidarity with the people of Oakland fighting in solidarity for the right to take back our streets. WHOSE STREETS?! OUR STREETS!!!
Please bring:
A scarf or handkerchief
Earplugs
We discuss various monetary and debt-related topics. For our next meeting we will read a section from Ellen Brown’s Web of Debt. It will be chapters 25-28 and cover more on international debt in the Asian theatre and elsewhere.
If people have ideas on what we should study together please bring it up during the next meeting. We encourage participation! It need only loosely pertain to debt, money, economics, and/or banking.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_VeYBmQOi8FTFEwUDJVdC0wQU0/view?usp=sharing
The Politics of Debt Reading Group is affiliated with the Bay Area Public School and Strike Debt Bay Area.
- student debt resistance
- organizing for public banking.
- advocating for Postal banking.
- ongoing study group
- helping out America’s only non-profit check-cashing organization and fighting against usurious for-profit pay-day lenders and their ilk
- our famous Strike Debt radio program
- reviewing our recent Debtors’ Assembly and preparing for the next one at the US Social Forum in San Jose
- Our presentation on money and debt at the US Social Forum
- saving the Berkeley Post Office and stopping the Staples non-union takeover of good Post Office jobs
- and much more!
Strike Debt – Principles of Solidarity
Strike Debt is building a debt resistance movement. We believe that most individual debt is illegitimate and unjust. Most of us fall into debt because we are increasingly deprived of the means to acquire the basic necessities of life: health care, education, and housing. Because we are forced to go into debt simply in order to live, we think it is right and moral to resist it.
We also oppose debt because it is an instrument of exploitation and political domination. Debt is used to discipline us, deepen existing inequalities, and reinforce racial, gendered, and other social hierarchies. Every Strike Debt action is designed to weaken the institutions that seek to divide us and benefit from our division. As an alternative to this predatory system, Strike Debt advocates a just and sustainable economy, based on mutual aid, common goods, and public affluence.
Strike Debt is committed to the principles and tactics of political autonomy, direct democracy, direct action, creative openness, a culture of solidarity, and commitment to anti-oppressive language and conduct. We struggle for a world without racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and all forms of oppression.
Strike Debt holds that we are all debtors, whether or not we have personal loan agreements. Through the manipulation of sovereign and municipal debt, the costs of speculator-driven crises are passed on to all of us. Though different kinds of debt can affect the same household, they are all interconnected, and so all household debtors have a common interest in resisting.
Strike Debt engages in public education about the debt-system to counteract the self-serving myth that finance is too complicated for laypersons to understand. In particular, it urges direct action as a way of stopping the damage caused by the creditor class and their enablers among elected government officials. Direct action empowers those who participate in challenging the debt-system.
Strike Debt holds that we owe the financial institutions nothing, whereas, to our friends, families and communities, we owe everything. In pursuing a long-term strategy for national organizing around this principle, we pledge international solidarity with the growing global movement against debt and austerity.
Monthly interfaith prayer meeting, held on second Sundays, dedicated to survivors and victims of violence and police terror in Oakland.
We are organizing this gathering for the community to connect, share prayers, writings and poems from all spiritual traditions, reflect and recharge and build coalitions interested in healing.
In April, it will be two years since we started holding these prayer meetings at the Baha’i Center. Come share prayers, quotes, poems, and favorite passages from your scriptures with us. We will serve a simple breakfast.
San Francisco is hosting the 83rd Annual Conference of Mayors June 19th, 2015 – June 22nd.. Around 250 Mayors will be in attendance. This is an opportunity to raise issues locally and nationally that are of concern to us.
- Black Lives Matter
- Gentrification
- Homelessness
- Privatization
- Homophobia and Transphobia
- Immigration
- The Environment
- Corporate Greed
- Wars not People
All are welcome to help plan for actions.