We need you to show up and speak out at 9:30AM at the Special Life Enrichment Committee Meeting at Oakland City Hall.

The fight to fully fund the Arts & Culture Manager position is not over. This role is essential to sustaining the cultural work and community healing our city desperately needs — and we must keep the pressure on City Council to do the right thing.

We’ve made progress. Last week, the East Bay Community Foundation, in partnership with the Akonadi Foundation, The San Francisco Foundation, and the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, announced $600,000 in grants to support Oakland’s arts and culture ecosystem — including direct support for artists, cultural spaces, and community-centered programming. Read more here: East Bay Community Foundation Supports Arts & Culture Organizations

This investment underscores what we’ve been saying all along: Oakland’s cultural workers and creative communities are vital to our public safety and collective liberation. But we need infrastructure and leadership in place — and that means making sure the Arts & Culture Manager position is fully funded in the city budget.

Additionally, we know that there are conversations happening at City Hall about trying to find the money to fund the Cultural Arts Division management position.

Join us at 9:30AM at City Hall. Bring your signs, your voice, your art, and your solidarity. Let’s make it clear: Oakland must fund culture. Oakland must fund healing. Oakland must fund us.

Last Wednesday, we took action Wells’ global
headquarters with a building blockade and street mural that put the bank
on notice about their dirty investments and WE SHUT THEM DOWN.
Join us Wednesday, July 30th, we’ll be back at the headquarters with a
rolling rowdy picket line to keep the momentum going. We want to make a
lot of noise, so bring your noisemakers, pots and pans and whatever else
you got.

Wells Fargo funds Palantir – a tech company that’s supercharging Trump’s
surveillance state. Palantir provides surveillance and tech
infrastructure to enable the ICE raids terrorizing communities across
the nation right now. Palantir has also been contracted to build a
database of
personal information about Americans.

Furthermore, Wells Fargo funds weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems who’s
been fueling the genocide in Palestine with a constant flow of arms and
it funds some of the worst fossil fuels companies. The bank has also
recently rolled back its climate commitments (the only major U.S. bank
to do so) and are engaged in trying to stop an ongoing unionization
effort at their branches.