Angela Yvonne Davis is an American Marxist and feminist political activist, philosopher, academic, and author. She is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Feminist Studies and History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Davis was a longtime member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and a founding member of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS). She was active in movements such as the Occupy movement and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign.
Oakland is a city in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area in the U.S. state of California. It is the county seat and most populous city in Alameda County, with a population of 440,646 in 2020. A major West Coast port, Oakland is the most populous city in the East Bay, the third most populous city in the Bay Area, and the eighth most populous city in California. It serves as the Bay Area's trade center: the Port of Oakland is the busiest port in Northern California, and the fifth- or sixth-busiest in the United States. A charter city, Oakland was incorporated on May 4, 1852, in the wake of the state's increasing population due to the California gold rush.
Richard Charles Blum was an American investor and the husband of United States Senator Dianne Feinstein. He was the chairman and president of Blum Capital, an equity investment management firm. Blum was on the boards of directors of several companies, including CB Richard Ellis, where until May 2009 he served as the chairman of that board. He was a regent of the University of California from 2002 until his death.
Barbara Jean Lee is an American politician who has been serving as a U.S. representative from California since 1998. A member of the Democratic Party, Lee represents California's 12th congressional district, which is based in Oakland and covers most of the northern part of Alameda County. According to the Cook Partisan Voting Index, it is one of the nation's most Democratic districts, with a rating of D+40.
Myles Falls Horton was an American educator, socialist, and co-founder of the Highlander Folk School, famous for its role in the Civil Rights Movement. Horton taught and heavily influenced most of the era's leaders. They included Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, John Lewis, James Bevel, Bernard Lafayette, and others who would create the Nashville Student Movement, Ralph Abernathy, John B. Thompson, and many others.
Robert Herbert is an American journalist and former op-ed columnist for The New York Times. His column was syndicated to other newspapers around the country. Herbert frequently writes on poverty, the Iraq War, racism and American political apathy towards racism. He is now a fellow at Demos and was elected to serve on the Common Cause National Governing Board in 2015.
Irma Glicman Adelman was a Romanian-American economist.
PolicyLink is a national research and action institute dedicated to advancing economic and social equity. It focuses on policies affecting low-income communities and communities of color. It is a nonprofit organization based in Oakland, California, with branch offices in New York City; Washington, DC; and Los Angeles.
The National Equity Project, formerly known as the Bay Area Coalition for Equitable Schools or BayCES, is an education reform organization that specializes in leadership development and changing culture and conditions in order to further equity objectives. It is a coaching and consulting organization based in Oakland, California; its name change in July 2010. The name was changed as the organization had expanded into new regions and began offering new services. In addition to schools, they also work with many districts and nonprofits on educational equity initiatives.
San Francisco Foundation is a San Francisco Bay Area philanthropy organization. It is one of the largest community foundations in the United States. Its mission is to mobilize community leaders, nonprofits, government agencies, and donors to advance racial equity, diversity, and economic inclusion. It focuses on social justice, community building, access to affordable housing, political action, policy change, workers' rights, employment opportunity, and civic leadership. Its current CEO is Fred Blackwell Jr.
Collective Impact (CI) is the commitment of a group of actors from different sectors to a common agenda for solving a specific social problem, using a structured form of collaboration. In 2021, the Collective Impact Forum changed the definition of collective impact to "Collective impact is a network of community members, organizations, and institutions who advance equity by learning together, aligning, and integrating their actions to achieve population and systems-level change. This definition identifies equity as the North Star for why and how collective impact work takes place, specifically names community members as key actors along with other stakeholders, and emphasizes the importance of systems change in this work." The concept of collective impact was first articulated in the 2011 Stanford Social Innovation Review article Collective Impact, written by John Kania, managing director at FSG, and Mark Kramer, Kennedy School at Harvard and Co-founder FSG. Collective impact was chosen as the #2 philanthropy buzzword for 2011, and has been recognized by the White House Council for Community Solutions as an important framework for progress on social issues.
African American Californians or Black Californians are residents of the state of California who are of African ancestry. According to 2019 United States Census Bureau estimates, those identified solely as African American or Black constituted 5.8% or 2,282,144 residents in California. Including an additional 1.2% who identified as having partial African ancestry, the figure was 7.0%. As of 2021, California has the largest multiracial African American population by number in the United States. African Americans are the fourth largest ethnic group in California after Hispanics, Whites, and Asians. Asians outnumbered African Americans in the 1980s.
The San Francisco Bay Area comprises nine northern California counties and contains five of the ten most expensive counties in the United States. Strong economic growth has created hundreds of thousands of new jobs, but coupled with severe restrictions on building new housing units, it has resulted in a statewide housing shortage which has driven rents to extremely high levels. The Sacramento Bee notes that large cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles both attribute their recent increases in homeless people to the housing shortage, with the result that homelessness in California overall has increased by 15% from 2015 to 2017. In September 2019, the Council of Economic Advisers released a report in which they stated that deregulation of the housing markets would reduce homelessness in some of the most constrained markets by estimates of 54% in San Francisco, 40 percent in Los Angeles, and 38 percent in San Diego, because rents would fall by 55 percent, 41 percent, and 39 percent respectively. In San Francisco, a minimum wage worker would have to work approximately 4.7 full-time jobs to be able to spend less than 30% of their income on renting a two-bedroom apartment.
Patricia Zavella is an anthropologist and professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz in the Latin American and Latino Studies department. She has spent a career advancing Latina and Chicana feminism through her scholarship, teaching, and activism. She was president of the Association of Latina and Latino Anthropologists and has served on the executive board of the American Anthropological Association. In 2016, Zavella received the American Anthropological Association's award from the Committee on Gender Equity in Anthropology to recognize her career studying gender discrimination. The awards committee said Zavella's career accomplishments advancing the status of women, and especially Latina and Chicana women have been exceptional. She has made critical contributions to understanding how gender, race, nation, and class intersect in specific contexts through her scholarship, teaching, advocacy, and mentorship. Zavella's research focuses on migration, gender and health in Latina/o communities, Latino families in transition, feminist studies, and ethnographic research methods. She has worked on many collaborative projects, including an ongoing partnership with Xóchitl Castañeda where she wrote four articles some were in English and others in Spanish. The Society for the Anthropology of North America awarded Zavella the Distinguished Career Achievement in the Critical Study of North America Award in the year 2010. She has published many books including, most recently, I'm Neither Here Nor There, Mexicans' Quotidian Struggles with Migration and Poverty, which focuses on working class Mexican Americans struggle for agency and identity in Santa Cruz County.
The 2024 United States Senate elections in California were held on November 5, 2024, to elect a member of the United States Senate to represent the state of California. There were two ballot items for the same Class 1 seat: a special election to fill the seat for the final two months of the 118th United States Congress, and a regular general election for a full term that starts on January 3, 2025, starting in the 119th United States Congress.
Jeannette Louise Oakes was an American educational theorist and Presidential Professor Emerita in Educational Equity at UCLA's Graduate School of Education & Information Studies. She was the founder and former director of UCLA’s Institute for Democracy, Education and Access (IDEA), the former director of the University of California’s All Campus Consortium on Research for Diversity (ACCORD), as well as the founding director of Center X, which is UCLA’s reform-focused program for the preparation of teachers and school administrators.
Linda Burnham is an American journalist, activist, and leader in women's rights movements, particularly with organizations and projects serving and advocating for women of color.
The curb cut effect is the phenomenon of disability-friendly features being used and appreciated by a larger group than the people they were designed for. For example, many hearing people use closed captioning. The phenomenon is named for curb cuts – miniature ramps comprising parts of sidewalk – which were first made for wheelchair access in particular places, but are now ubiquitous and no longer widely recognized as a disability-accessibility feature.
Sheng Thao is an American politician who is the 51st and current mayor of Oakland, California. She is the first Hmong American mayor of a major city in the United States. She was elected as mayor of Oakland in November 2022 and started her term in January 2023. On November 5, 2024, Thao was recalled. She is the first mayor in Oakland’s history to be recalled.
Erna Prather Harris was an American journalist, businesswoman, and activist, known for her pacifism. Born in Oklahoma, she grew up in the segregated South and attended Black schools. After graduating from Douglass High School in Kingfisher, Oklahoma, she worked as a maid to earn enough money to attend an integrated university. Graduating from Wichita State University in 1936, and unable to find work, she opened her own newspaper, The Kansas Journal.
