Representation, Liberation, and Economic Uplift: Oakland @kyndellewt2018-blog - Tumblr Blog

Me with Fam 1st Founders Marshawn Lynch, Marcus Peters, and Joshua Johnson.

The Intersection of Purpose and Passion

Reflecting on my second week at Fam First, I have learned so much more about the city of Oakland and the immense interconnectivity between the the industries in The Town. As the classes have progressed, business owners and professionals from around the city have come in to the center to teach. A serial entrepreneur and UC Berkeley graduate teaches the Business Building 101 class, A practicing architect teaches the Intro to Architecture class, and an ever wise man from the neighborhood teaches chess each week. These instructors, along with many others, give the students learning experiences that they would rarely receive within the classroom. The founders, three professional football players, all have stopped by the center to see the progress and see where growth is necessary. All with business endeavors apart from the foundation, the players bring their various experiences (and their funding) to the center.

On Friday, January 19th, a tech entrepreneur came into the center to demo his new app, combining rap music and SAT prep to the students. His app matches vocabulary of the SAT to rap lyrics for across decades, to make standardized test prep a little more interesting. The founder crossed his passion of hip hop and education to comprise his invention. His path and many of the other things I have seen within the center have made it clear to me that the most effective and productive organizations are rooted in passion. This is a lesson I will take with me throughout my college years as I begin to navigate the professional world.

Fam 1st Family Foundation and West Oakland Youth Center: Week 1

Oakland was never built with the success of Black youth in mind. During the era of the final days of Martin Luther King Jr., the Black Panther Movement was established as an anti police brutality and pro black youth organization in Oakland. The city of Oakland still faces issues of police brutality and Black youth in need of support. During this Winter Term I had the opportunity to work with a non-profit that works combats one of these problems. Oakland has had a history of amazing non-profit work and Fam 1st Family Foundation is the program I am able to be a part of this January. Coming into my internship, I thought I was going to be doing much more emailing and coffee grabbing, but my experience has been much different. I joined the program the day they opened their youth center in West Oakland. There they have begun teaching Architecture, Business, STEM prep, and basic homework help at the West Oakland location. I have largely been helping with administrative aspects of the program and establishing it within the community. Like many urban cities, the public school system faces many difficulties and Fam 1st helps to bridge many gaps within the system. There has been a realization of the resegregation of Oakland schools as well a brain drain of high scoring students leaving the district. These two issues lead to large inequities within the school system. It is really amazing to see to differences that the program is making in its first weeks of functioning and the promise of a great future ahead.

https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/workers/black-panthers/1969/03/26.htm

https://ww2.kqed.org/forum/2016/09/07/oakland-public-schools-largely-segregated-by-race-class/?a=commentsATag

http://www.sfgate.com/education/article/Top-students-fleeing-Oakland-public-schools-2453623.php

Beast Mode, Black Economics, and Community

After spending a week on the floor at Beast Mode and beginning my research about Black economics, I find myself recognizing the connection between community uplift and business world. After having a conversation with one of the workers at Beast Mode, I truly recognized how the closely the store is to the surrounding community. Beast Mode was opened in February of 2015 in the heart of downtown Oakland, near Chinatown. While Fam 1st Family Foundation was started over 8 years ago by many of the same founders as Beast Mode, the specifically community oriented themes at Beast Mode are very evident to me. Upon talking to one of my co-workers at the store, he made it even more clear. An ordinary conversation about a hilarious video on Facebook turned into an in depth discussion about Beast Mode and its place in Oakland. There are several homeless, drug-addicted, and mentally unstable people who inhabit the surrounding area of the store and Rell, my coworker, had formed connections with the people and often offered them free shoes and clothes if needed. He spoke to about how important it is to treat everybody as a person and how dehumanizing it can be to just ignore someone and pretend they don’t exist. Rell and the rest of the guys had gone out the night before and there was an officer involved shooting at a BART station very close to the store. A conversation of the long lasting relationship between police brutality and Oakland, CA surfaced.

Almost all of the people who work in the store are family members or life-long friends of Marshawn Lynch, so often the team seems less like a franchise and more like a family function with nieces, nephews, and cousins around at any given moment.

On Wednesdays, the store offers free kids haircuts and, recently, they have launched an affordable phone plan called Beast-Mobile that many people from the community utilize. There is also a stand at the checkout counter full of info about events and artists emerging locally:

The mixtapes offered as well as the list of Black businesses found in the stand reminded me of my research form the book Black economics : solutions for economic and community empowerment by Jawanza Kunjufu. A large aspect of Black Economics is that is community oriented as to uplift many of the population.

Day one at the Beast Mode store front.

Some of my top picks of the clothes at the store. Mnyama means beast in Swahili, probably one of my favorite pieces.

An inspirational corner with pictures of Tupac Shakur, Malcolm X, E-40, and Marshawn, and a couple continents of Africa. Also, a snapshot of the behind the scenes action.

#beastmode #oakland #wt2018 #oberlin

Sources for Research

Operation Small Axe: Police Terrorism and Resistance in Oakland, CA

Adimu Madyun, 2010

City schools and the American dream : reclaiming the promise of public education / Pedro A. Noguera

Learning to survive [electronic resource] / a production of Hedrick Smith Productions, Inc. ; South Carolina ETV

Black economics : solutions for economic and community empowerment / by Jawanza Kunjufu

Entrepreneurship and self-help among Black Americans : a reconsideration of race and economics / John Sibley Butler

The economics of racial discontent: Black America in developmental perspective [by] Wilfred L. David

The myth of Black capitalism Earl Ofari Hutchinson

The business of Black power : community development, capitalism, and corporate responsibility in postwar America / edited by Laura Warren Hill and Julia Rabig

Teached: Code Oakland- Loudspeaker Films, 2015

Still not equal : expanding educational opportunity in society / edited by M. Christopher Brown II ; with assistance from RoSusan D. Bartee ; foreword by Michael L. Lomax

Project Overview

I have been given the opportunity to work for football player, Marshawn Lynch’s, business based in Oakland, California called Beast Mode. As my winter term project, I would be interning in the community organization founded within Beastmode, Fam 1st Family Foundation. Fam 1st Family Foundation is an organization created to help build self-esteem and academic learning skills for Oakland youth through programming, funded by Beast Mode profits and other corporate sponsorships. I want to work with the Fam First Foundation to have hands on experience with a local community uplift organization and learn about coalition building with local companies and what components make a successful community oriented organization. I am also interested in exploring the connection between Beastmode and Fam First because I am curious about how the business enterprise and the non-profit aspects are combined. I am pursuing an Economics and Politics double major at Oberlin, and one of my educational goals for this project is to highlight the intersection between my two majors. In one of my politics classes this semester, we spoke about the importance of linked fate with role models and representation of people of color, and how it affects black politics as a whole. We also spoke about the correlation of black capitalism and black liberation, and how these two things interact. At Fam 1st Family Foundation, both of these concepts interact, and I would love to work at the axis of this intersection during winter term 2018. On a day to day basis, I would help in the development and execution of programming that help achieve the organization’s mission. At Fam 1st, there are bi-weekly football and cheer workshops, planned with the help of the NFL and several professional players. To help with workshops, I would help with publicity aspect of reaching out to families who qualify for the workshops, registering participants, and orchestrating speakers at each event. I would also help with the communication with sponsors of catering and retail needs at each workshops. I would also help run the weekly literacy session at local elementary school, making sure tutors are fully prepared to work with students and trying to implement more programs at schools in the area. Finally, I would be responsible for expanding the search for the annual college scholars recipient. In the spring of my senior year of high school, I was the first woman to win the Fam 1st Foundation college scholarship, and one of my personal projects this winter term will be to ensure that the scholarship competition is more accessible to woman-identifying contestants. To track my project throughout my winter term, I write daily blog-posts reflecting on my tasks of the day, and to relate my responsibilities back to the overall topics of correlation of economic uplift and black liberation through the lens of Oakland, California. I would also conduct some research to prepare for the winter term, investigating the persisting political, educational, and economics issues that Fam 1st Foundation is targeting with their mission. Combined with the blog, I would also create a photobook, tracking my progress throughout the internship and well as documenting aspects of my previous research that I come across in my work.

Links

Fam 1st: https://fam1stfamilyfoundation.org/

Beast Mode: https://www.beastmodeonline.com/pages/locations

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Representation, Liberation, and Economic Uplift: Oakland