Location: Oakland, CA
Region: California
Founding: 2006
Founders/Leadership: Liz Suk, Executive Director
Oakland Rising was founded in 2006 by the executive directors from APEN, Ella Baker Center, E-BASE, and Urban Habitat. They envisioned an alliance of organizations that aligned with their civic engagement work, collectively worked on electoral organizing, and strengthened the social justice movement in Oakland. By aligning regional like-minded forces, leading with values that center social justice, and flexing people’s power through mass-based electoral organizing, Oakland Rising works toward realizing shared dreams of health, happiness, safety, and opportunity for all.
A multilingual, multiracial economic justice collaborative, Oakland Rising, is building the political power of working-class communities of color along with three local alliances: Bay Rising, San Francisco Rising, and Silicon Valley Rising. Together, in response to the mounting inequity and displacement occurring in the Bay Area, they work to build political power that advances genuinely progressive policy solutions supporting healthy, equitable, and inclusive communities for all.
Together, the collaborative has won flagship policies at local and state levels that included a minimum wage increase; a tenant protection ordinance; a landmark jobs policy that featured living wages, local hires, and job access for workers with disadvantages, prior incarcerations, and other employment barriers; Prop 47, a state measure reallocating resources from incarceration to community-based re-entry services; and Proposition 30, a state measure that returned $6 billion to the state for critical services by raising taxes on the wealthiest Californians.
Oakland Rising remains committed and forward-thinking, ready to face new challenges supporting a thriving, progressive community in Oakland.