Oakland

Opinion: Fund Job Training for Oakland’s Underserved Communities

Published

7 years ago

May 1, 2018

By Greg McConnell | The McConnell Group

On Tuesday, April 24, I attended a City Council committee meeting where a major fight broke out over the issue of Job training for Oakland’s underserved communities.
What seemed to be clear to me was that everyone agreed on the need to provide Oakland’s Black and Brown communities training, so people of color can have hope for better futures for themselves and their families.

While Oakland brags that it is going through an economic boom and is experiencing a 4 percent or less unemployment rate, census tracks in east and west Oakland have unemployment rates as high as 10 percent.
By some estimates, African- American and Latino unemployment can run as high as 17 percent.

Everyone at the meeting also agreed that training programs like Cypress Mandela, Men of Valor, and Laborer’s Local 304 are doing great work providing life skills and job skills training to young people and formerly incarcerated people who are unprepared to join the workforce.

No, the fight was not about whether there is need or whether there is ability to provide help. The fight was about whether money from recent bond measures approved by the voters could source the revenues to pay for the training.

As I sat there, watching people shout at one another, I thought to myself, why are people fighting? There must be a way to get money for training. We find money for public art, bike lanes, pre-school to college, and many other things that we want to fund.

Why can we not fund something as fundamentally and desperately needed as life skills and job training for Blacks and Browns, too many of whom aimlessly walk our streets with nothing to do but smoke blunts and get in trouble?

This past November we created the Oakland Jobs Foundation to aggregate donations from Oakland’s major businesses and developers to support job training. We recently awarded $150,000 to two jobs training programs.

While this is a good step forward, it is not nearly enough to address the need.

There is a solution. Let’s share Oakland’s economic boom. I propose a ballot measure that directs the City to earmark a percentage of the revenue from new taxes collected from construction of new residential and commercial development.

The cranes that line our streets bring hundreds of millions of dollars to the City. By earmarking $5 million a year, we could train and reclaim the lives of more than a thousand men and women a year.
This would not be welfare or a handout.

We would insist on attendance and participation requirements for program participants. Nor, would this be a fund for “poverty pimps”. Programs would be vetted for past performance and success rates, and there would be strict accountability and tracking of whether program participants enter the workforce.

Who would oppose this? Not taxpayers, because this would not be another tax on them. Not residential and commercial developers, because they have to pay taxes anyway, and this just allocates a portion of the new taxes to training.

Not the City, because this is not taking money away from existing programs, it is earmarking a percentage of new revenues.

If I am right in my assessment that everyone agrees on need and the existence of programs that can help, then this approach should be doable. If not, why not?

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Activism

Oakland Post: Week of October 30 – November 5, 2024

The printed Weekly Edition of the Oakland Post: Week of October 30 – November 5, 2024

Published

21 hours ago

November 1, 2024

Oakland Post

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Activism

Minister King X, Civil Rights Group Sue California Prisons Over Right to Protest

Oakland – Minister King X, a prison ‘artivist,’ and a civil rights group will hold a press conference at 11:30 a.m. on Sept. 27 at the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) headquarters at 1515 S St. in Sacramento, CA. Sept. 20, 2024, Minister King, a community organizer with California Prison Focus, and the group All of Us Or None (AOUON) filed a lawsuit against the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) and top state government officials.

Published

4 days ago

October 29, 2024

Oakland Post

Minister King X

Special to The Post

Sept. 20, 2024, Minister King, a community organizer with California Prison Focus, and the group All of Us Or None (AOUON) filed a lawsuit against the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) and top state government officials.

The lawsuit challenges Minister King’s unlawful arrest on Aug. 9, 2021, during “Black August,” for allegedly violating Penal Code section 4571, which criminalizes people with felony convictions standing near prison facilities.

Minister King was arrested and imprisoned by plainclothes CDCR officers after a July 2021 protest calling for the release of political prisoner Ruchell “Cinque” Magee.

The charges were dropped without a hearing, but Minister King and AOUON allege in their complaint that the arrest was retaliation for his activism and a violation of his First Amendment rights.

According to Medium, Minister King X Pyeface of Kage Universal is a rapper, producer, and ‘artivist’ from Oakland who spent six years in federal prison and 18 years in California State Prison, where he was the youngest new African organizer during the 2011 to 2013 California Prisoners Hunger Strike.

CDCR’s report for Minister King’s arrest describes King, and many other activists, public figures, and organizations, as “Black Identity Extremists” and “Black Supremacist Extremists.”

These racist terms were used to label organizations such as Black Lives Matter as terrorist organizations and their use was abandoned by the FBI in 2019.

The lawsuit seeks to prevent CDCR from using Penal Code 4571 to target formerly incarcerated individuals for exercising their rights.

The press conference on Friday will discuss the constitutional issues associated with PC 4571, which prohibits an individual who has previously been convicted of a felony and incarcerated in a California state prison from being present on the grounds of carceral facilities or anywhere adjacent to those grounds without the consent of the warden or sheriff.

Additionally, 4571 prohibits these individuals from being anywhere other individuals in state custody may be, and anywhere adjacent to those in custody individuals without consent.

King and AOUON have alleged in their complaint that the statute violates the First Amendment rights of formerly incarcerated individuals and is overly broad and vague.

“In the depths of Pelican Bay State Prison, and other correctional facilities across the United States, a forgotten population of elderly incarcerated individuals awaits redemption. They are not the ‘worst of the worst,’ violent predators or Black Identity Extremists,” says Minister King X. “Rather, they are a unique class of individuals who possess the wisdom, experience, and desire to promote peace and reconciliation. I am advocating for and on behalf of these elders and the rights of all other prisoners.”

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Arts and Culture

Faces Around the Bay: Blanche Richardson

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson came to the Sydney Goldstein Theatre on Sept. 10 to participate in an event hosted by City Arts and Lectures and Marcus Books to celebrate the publication of her memoir, Lovely One.

Published

4 days ago

October 29, 2024

Oakland Post