The Village in Oakland #feedthepeople

10/11/2026

Today was a nice vibe at Life Is Living. Thanks to everyone who came to our Housing Justice Zone, who wrote cards that were placed in the care packages that went out to curbside communities on e12 tonight along with bowls of greens and grits and curry tofu biscuit sliders.

Thanks to everyone who came thru to learn more about what's happening to unhoused Oaklanders.and thanks to the 71 folks who sign the petition today.

And thanks to the village team than made it happen today.

Have you signed the petition demanding the city and county open up vacant public lands for unhoused people to move on to so they can get off the streets and not be swept or towed? Starting with the list of 45 lands the city released in July 2026 as potential sites for unhoused folks? It's October and everyday unhoused people are being terrorized and traumatized and pushed deeper into traumas by sweeps. Stop the sweeps and open the land. Sign the petition here https://c.org/6vk6mkkdqh

10/10/2026

Tomorrow! Hope to to see you at the 18th Annual life is living festival at Little Bobby Hutton Park AKA to firmary park in West Oakland.

There's so much that's going to be going on if you know you know and if you don't know where you been? Please come through and find out. We promise it's going to be come one of the most favorite things to do every year. Check the flyers below to see an incomplete list of some of the things that are happening!

And don't forget to stop by the housing Justice on produced by The Village in Oakland

remember to bring something to the Feed The People - Oakland booth to the care packages that we make and distribute every week in the Oakland streets. Whatever you bring tomorrow will be distributed in the streets next Wednesday October 14th.

Check the flyers to find out what we will be accepting. And stay for a little bit to make a few care packages while you're there.

Here's some of the other things that's going to be happening at the housing Justice Zone for you to check out:

Walk In Our Shoes: an interactive challenge to see if you know what to do if you were to find yourself living on the streets. It'll be a really great opportunity to see if you actually are ready if you ended up in the streets due to losing a job, a medical emergency, or a massive earthquake and tsunami. Best believe it will be a very eye-opening and thought provoking activity. And you'll pick up if you survival hacks along the way.

Cardboard and Concrete Outdoor Art Exhibit: Nowhere to Sleep, Eveywhere to Create. Check out the works a very talented and inspiring unhoused and recently re-housed artists from our Collective and are invited guests. They'll be several prints you can choose from at the exhibit that you can take home for free.

Soul Food Shack Mobile apothecary: check out plant-based medicines and education. This program provides free plant-based medicine and free educational materials and free workshops to unhoused residents and low-income residents. Learn how you can support the program as a housed person.

A Celebration Of Live, An Invocation of Justice: visit our memorial for our unhoused loved ones who died in the streets while waiting for support services housing. If you know someone who has passed away while on housed you're welcome to add their name to the memorial. You are also welcome to leave an offering on the altar.

We also have other folks coming to set up info booths with the 411 and calls to action including:
- the youth residents of the Youth Spirit Artworks tiny house village in deep east that is being slated to be shut down, even though their lease isn't up till 2027, even though the city hasn't paid their contracted grant for almost a year, even though there is no plan in place of where the youth will go and what will happen to all those tiny homes.

Warrior woman extrodinare Misty Cross with the original Mom's for Housing and currently the Program.Manager of the Black Panther Party Apartments

See y'all tomorrow!

10/08/2026

Oakland is sweeping unhoused people from the streets, but thousands of people have nowhere else to go.

We demand that the City of Oakland and Alameda County immediately open suitable vacant and underutilized public land as voluntary sanctuary sites for unhoused Oakland residents.

These sites would give people living in tents, cars, vans, RVs and other survival dwellings somewhere safe and legal to go while they wait for transitional shelters or permanent housing.

PEOPLE NEED SOMEWHERE TO GO
Oakland has dramatically intensified encampment enforcement.
Under Oakland's new Encampment Abatement Policy, the city can close encampments even when shelter or alternative housing is unavailable. Vehicles are excluded from the definition of an encampment and can be cited and towed under state and local vehicle laws, even when that vehicle is someone's home. People are literally being left on the street with nothing to survive.

Oakland does not have enough shelter, safe parking, cabins, or deeply affordable housing for everyone who needs it.

Oakland's 2024 Homelessness Strategic Action Plan reported 5,485 people experiencing homelessness, including 3,659 people living unsheltered. The County’'s 2026 Point-in-Time Count reported 4,410 people are unhoused; but a Point-in-Time Count is only a snapshot and does not represent every person who experiences homelessness during the year.

Fewer than 1,300 shelter beds, safe-parking spaces, and cabins currently exist in Oakland, and additional programs are scheduled to close between October and December 2026.

At the same time, encampment sweeps continue. Since November 2025, sweeps and tows have increased by 91%.

Where are people supposed to go?

If the government is going to tell people where they cannot be, the government has a responsibility to create somewhere they can safely be.

OPEN THE LAND: Create Sanctuary Sites for Oakland's Unhoused

10/06/2026

Slide thru The Village in Oakland HOUSING JUSTICE ZONE this weekend at Life Is Living. Please bring items on the mutual aid donation drive flier and help us make care packages that our Feed The People program will be taking out to the streets Wednesday October 14.

10/05/2026

This Saturday is the 18th Annual Life Is Living festival at Defermery Park AKA little Bobby Hutton Park in West Oakland.

There's going to be so much happening - multiple stages, a Black Panther Party survival conference, a food and artisan marketplace, dance classes, martial art classes and demos, an amazing youth zone, skateboarding area, roller skating area, the swimming pool is going to be open so bring your bathing suit,and so much more.

The Village in Oakland will be hosting the housing Justice Zone again. If you believe housing is a human right, if you believe homelessness is not a crime, and if you believe the city and the county can be doing way more to invest public resources and real solutions that are created and led by formerly unhoused and currently on house leaders make sure you come through and check us out.

And please consider bringing one of the items on our mutual aid list to our Feed The People - Oakland table which will be at the housing Justice zone. You're free to just drop off one of the items or you can stay for a little bit and help us assemble the care packages your donated items are going to go into. All the care packages made at Life Is Living will be taken out to the streets during our weekly Feed The People distro on Wednesday, October 14th.

Hope to see you out there this saturday. If you know then you know. And if you don't know, where you've been? Come through so you can find out!

06/25/2026

"its really hard that we live in a city and a larger national government that literally makes sure groups of people are denied the basic things they need to just survive. thriving and the pursuit of happiness is a high bar impossible to reach when you literally have food, shelter, clean water, employment, health, safety and stability systemically withheld from you, for generations. keep doing what your are doing mom. and I hope more people stand up and join you. its gonna take a village to end this inhumanity."

^^^what joyous de sis who runs the Village mobile apothecary program said when she learned Sam Suet killed himself this morning.

We met Sam in 2016. he was a Cambodian refugee, unhoused in Funktown, dealing with a lot. he was very kind and soft spoken and looked out for people. he built his own home on e12 median in 2019. he had a car and he made a living as a handyman and mechanic.

May 12, 2025 the city of Oakland bulldozed the home he built with is own hands and threw away all his tools and towed his car. and said if he didn't move into Mandela House he would be arrested. so with no other choices he moved across town to Mandela House. he was promised mental health services, housing navigation, goal setting and support, job placement. he was promised a year in the hotel and that he would be exited from Mandela House into permanent housing.

all those promises were broken. what sam and dozens of residents of Mandela House received was neglect, extreme and constant verbal abuse and mental abuse, threats of violence, threats of being kicked out to the streets, uninhabitable living conditions, and an completely incompetent staff who literally DID NOTHING except collect a paycheck, steal residents mail, go into residents rooms and steal their property, and sell them drugs.
on May 29th 2026 Sam and dozens of residents were exited from Mandela House. very, very few got permanent housing. even fewer got job placement. many were down graded into tuff sheds that have no water or electricity or locks on their doors and smell like p**s, or into RVs that are falling apart, filty, uninhabitable on a site that smells like sewage. several were merely kicked to the streets with literally nothing to survive.

Sam was one of the folks kicked to the curb. the house he built no longer existed. the tools he need to make a living were never replaced. the car he could have lived in he was never able to get back. and the community that provide him with care, safety, and belonging had been demolished and scattered.

For the past two weeks Sam talked about giving up. He wasn't the same guy.

Surviving a war didn't break Sam. Being a refugee didn't break Sam. living on the streets for 20 years didn't break Sam. the city of Oakland and Housing Consortium of the East Bay - two entities that received MILLIONS of public dollars to shelter Sam for a year, promise him everything he needed to never return to homelessness - broke him. and they have refused to take an accountability for the harm they cause not just Sam but everyone else that was supposed to be in that hotel but got left on the streets; everyone who was in that hotel who was mistreated and lied to; everyone who didn't get the biggest promises of all: to never return to homelessness.

The city of Oakland and Housing Consortium of the East Bay have blood on their hands - again. this isn't the first time this kind of injustice and inhumanity has happened. ya'll have heard The Village for ten years now speak on the corruption, the mismanagement, the failure, the inhumanity imbedded in Oakland's homeless industrial complex. Sam was the latest causality of this wicked system and the people who fail to do their six figure jobs.

The Village is going to go even harder with the memory of Sam to fuel our fire for justice.

Rest in peace Sam Suet. Gone, but not forgotten. We will get justice for you. On citas.

06/16/2026

Earlier this month The Village Executive Director Needa Bee was voted onto the Leadership Board of the Alameda County's EveryOne Home - "a collective impact initiative and Alameda County’s Continuum of Care that unites the efforts of city and county government partners, nonprofit service providers, individuals with lived experience, community members, and more. EveryOne Home brings everyone together, using the power of people to end homelessness in Alameda County."

"The Leadership Board provides overall leadership for our collective impact initiative and serves as the compass for the homelessness response system in Alameda County. It sets the
vision, strategic direction and collective goals for the entire homelessness response system and ensures accountability from all subcommittees and workgroups. The Leadership Board
ensures that racial equity is at the center of our work to end homelessness and that people with lived experience are represented in decision-making roles throughout the system. The Leadership Board also holds the formal designation as the Continuum of Care (CoC) Board, as required by HUD."

to learn more about everyone home check out their website https://everyonehome.org.

06/04/2026

In regards to homelessness, the poor, the marginalized, the youth, we are in an era where the elected and bueroctrats are in a race to see who can be the most cruel, fastest.

Here in Oakland, high ranking administrators in charge of the city's approach to homelessness showed their level of cruelty in those text messages that were made public.

The people involved with those text messages are no longer there. But others who share in their disdain of the unhoused are still in their positions of power. And the systems they operate in are working quite well to make sure there is no solution to homeless in Oakland, and that now even less support exists.

The city of Oakland's solution to homelessness is 100% make em disappear.

And the public isn't really pushing back.

I piece of Oakland's soul has died. What's happening is not okay. But the general public seems to have given up on fighting for a call so prominent ten years ago HOUSING FOR ALL and END THE SWEEPS cuz SWEEPS KILL.

We live in an era of our (The Town's) collective trauma to the housing crisis and all the s**t that came with it where It's easier to hate on the victim's most impacted by the crisis than to hold the politicians responsible for the accountable.

and politicians only listen to people who vote. And most of The Town doesn't vote.and.specifically, most unhoused people don't vote.

So they won't listen to most of us.

And in the same breath, they absolutely don't represent most of us.

Quite a predicament.

05/18/2026

Public records reveal how Jestin Johnson and other officials were pressured to close encampments by developers, and in at least one case, the governor.

05/18/2026

Warning - for unhoused folks, folks who were unhoused during the time this group of anti-unhoused beurocrats ran Oakland's homeless response, and folks who care about unhoused folks - the contents of this article are triggering.

We are not surprised, having witnessed the city hall administrators named in this article treat unhoused residents in real time. But to have what we have been saying confirmed is a relief, a finally. We hope there is justice for all those impacted by this bigotry, inhumanity, abuse of power, and hate. We hope there is massive transformative change systemically and socially. and we hope a mirror held to all who joined the anti-homeless bandwagon while claiming compassion, humanity and dignity - both the public and those inside city hall.

https://oaklandside.org/2026/05/18/grants-pass-oakland-text-messages-marshawn-lynch/?utm_campaign=snd-autopilot&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook_The_Oaklandside&fbclid=IwdGRjcAR4WCFleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZAwzNTA2ODU1MzE3MjgAAR6-OShwWanydngpFIC7VB5RBmlYhMPdFG6FBmZplxzE8LNrWQfNAcimZ4bbnA_aem_M7A7-vrW6IuZVDEW0S-SZg

Public records reveal how Jestin Johnson and other officials were pressured to close encampments by developers, and in at least one case, the governor.