The challenge

Oakland is changing quickly from a mostly African-American city to a multiracial, multiethnic urban region. For example, Oakland’s Roosevelt Middle School was 26 percent African-American only five years ago; today, 15 percent of the students are African-American. The four schools, which include Roosevelt, that are served by the East Bay Asian Youth Center (EBAYC) are 85 to 90 percent Asian-American and Latino. Even within San Francisco’s East Bay community of recent immigrants from Asia, a broad diversity of language and culture creates barriers to traditional organizing. At the same time, these neighborhoods face crime and poverty. EBAYC's challenge is to build on the strengths of cultural diversity and create a sense of common cause among such different, and changing, populations.

Seeds of commitment

In 1976, a dozen Asian-American students from Berkeley High School launched a community center for Asian-American youth. Working after school and during summer school, these students helped Southeast Asian newcomers learn English and join friendship networks. Eventually, they expanded their efforts to Oakland to create EBAYC. The organization's current leaders are all immigrants or children of immigrants who live in the neighborhoods where they work.

David Kakishiba, a Japanese-American whose family was interned for four years after the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, has served as EBAYC’s executive director for more than 23 years. He recently was elected to the Oakland School Board. Other staff members are mothers with children in neighborhood schools. Evangelina Lara was a teacher in Mexico, where she lived until 1999. Dung Thi Tran is from Vietnam. Lew Chien Saelee arrived from Laos in 1980 after spending five years in a refugee camp. Isabel Toscano was the daughter of Mexican field workers. Rosa Vicente, from Guatemala, was the mother of a student at Roosevelt Middle School when EBAYC recruited her as a volunteer.

Accomplishments

EBAYC is building a racially, ethnically, and culturally diverse membership of families who live in low-income neighborhoods. EBAYC focuses on American-born and immigrant families from Cambodian, Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean, Laotian, African-American, Latino, Mien, Native American, and South Asian communities. The organization serves and develops the leadership of low-income parents in the multiracial Eastlake, San Antonio, and Fruitvale neighborhoods of Oakland. Among its organizing tools are the Parent Action Committes (PACs), established at several schools. Today, 500 Asian, Latino, and African-American parent members are engaged in PACs in three neighborhood schools where no parent organization had existed. The results are impressive. For example, in 1997, Roosevelt Middle School was notorious for major gang-related and racial violence, truancy and crime. Since then, a PAC-inspired increase in parent involvement has helped decrease truancy by 40 percent, and Roosevelt is one of the few schools in Alameda County to meet the state’s academic-performance standards. English-language learners are sharing in these gains.

New community partnerships, which EBAYC facilitated, provide health, social, and after-school services at Roosevelt. EBAYC also has increased parent engagement and achieved security improvements, including new fences, increased lighting, and maintenance. Working with Isabel Toscano, EBAYC’s organizing director, Saelee and Vicente created a new health center. The organization also has helped shape public policy. In 1996, it wrote and campaigned for a local ballot measure that established a City of Oakland budget spot for children and youth services. Today, $9 million a year is dedicated to creating new and expanding programs for children throughout Oakland. EBAYC also sponsors the SASI League (San Antonio Sports Initiative), a new youth sports program based in the San Antonio neighborhood of Oakland. And EBAYC's Streetside Productions Video Program has been awarded honorary mention in the Best Short Documentary category at this year's Oakland International Film Festival for its production, “C me in, C me out," a documentary about Oakland's Cambodia gangs.

Leadership style

“EBAYC stands out because of its ability to respond to changing community needs and emerging opportunities,” says Hedy Chang, a senior program officer at the Evelyn & Walter Haas, Jr. Fund, in San Francisco. That flexibility is rooted in a notable and effective approach to cross-cultural power-building. Monthly PAC meetings start with parents breaking into small groups, where they can speak their own language and select projects to work on together. Then they convene as a larger school-wide group to report their discussions in English, resolve any significant differences between groups, and ratify decisions on public actions and community events -- such as beautification projects and multicultural fairs. Finally, community organizers host periodic “leadership academies” for leaders from all the PACS. The work that EBAYC’s leaders find most rewarding is what they call the “lifelong process” centered on ending isolation at community, political and personal levels. “All of us are either immigrants or we are children of immigrants,” they wrote. “Because of our differences with the native-born population – language, culture, gender, race, education, money – we experience intense feelings of loneliness, isolation, anger, fear, and pain. And the vast majority of families who live in our neighborhoods share our experiences. We do not want to live like this. We do not want our neighbors and our friends and our families to have to live like this.”

The future

EBAYC is intensifying its efforts to help families understand how their children develop and to improve children's school readiness. The organization hopes to increase home visits by teachers; encourage principals to educate parents about curriculum and teaching standards; raise the number of parent visits to classrooms; and help parents and teachers start school-reform accountability teams. EBAYC also plans to expand its bilingual public-safety foot patrols, and work with the East Bay Local Development Corporation to promote redevelopment.

More about EBAYC’s leaders

“Anyone who knows about EBAYC’s work respects it, but they deserve much more recognition for what they have accomplished. They’re very creative and tenacious in getting the various members of the diverse community to work together. They’ve so enriched the San Antonio neighborhood where I live. If anything happened to them, it would create such a hole.”
— Liz Sullivan, education director, Oakland Community Organization