Candice Elder on Organizing for Community Self-Determination
The East Oakland Collective (EOC) is a membership-based organization in deep East Oakland dedicated to racial and economic equity for the underserved people and communities in East Oakland. EOC’s community organizing and programs focus on leadership development, civic engagement, food and housing justice, transportation planning, and economic empowerment.
Blue Heart had the honor of speaking with Candice Elder, founder and director of EOC.
Interview edited for clarity.
Lindley Mease: Let’s start things off hearing a little about your work overall, and how you came to organize in East Oakland.
Candice Elder: I founded EOC in January 2016 as a way to give back to the community I grew up in and still live in, and also give a way for the next generation of leaders to make a difference in their communities in the area of racial and economic equity work. For us, that’s addressing issues in East Oakland such as dis-investment and a lack of fair and correct political representation, getting ahead of the curve of gentrification, and stopping the further displacement of long-time residents of East Oakland, particularly our Black and brown residents.
We do civic engagement and economic empowerment. We have a lending circle program for East Oakland residents to help boost their credit scores, savings, and debt management, and to help jump start small business and entrepreneurship.
What we’re probably most known for is our work with and on behalf of our unhoused population, doing advocacy and policy organizing in housing justice work. We do a lot of advocating for folks who are living unsheltered on the street, serving on every single committee or coalition that there is on homelessness in Oakland, and empowering our unhoused leaders to be able to advocate for themselves and their families, all the way to bringing them to City Hall. They are the ones with the lived experiences and they should be at the forefront.
We are on every single referral list, from the Alameda County Health Department to clinics and hospitals and social workers. They call us to refer their clients to our food and supply program. We employ folks who are unemployed, formerly incarcerated, or low income, to help distribute our food and supplies. Our programs have won numerous awards and we tend to get a lot of attention, which we’re happy to, because awareness is part of the narrative of homelessness and what is actually going on in the street.
This is not as well known, but we also have a neighborhood transportation planning program and we do a lot of contract work with the city of Oakland. You cannot set foot in East Oakland without talking to us. We are disrupting the traditional Euro-centric way of planning, which is that you plan for communities and you involve them — if at all — at the very end, but the decisions and plans have already been made. We’re one of the first community-based organizations to work with the City of Oakland to bring the community in at the onset of the planning process.
Lindley Mease: Wow, you all do so much! Providing direct services and also building leadership and developing folks and their self-determination to show up for their struggles in policy processes and in mutual aid that is apart from the system. I’m curious how you think about that framework of working across so many kinds of change?
Candice Elder: We have an inside-outside model. We really hold our elected officials and local government accountable. We will partner with government only when it’s in the best interest of the community. Other than that, we are very skeptical of the government. But we do understand we need to be at the table when it comes to driving policy. We’re brought in a lot to consult at the city level, the county level, and sometimes even the assembly and congressional level, on what is happening to our Black and brown and unhoused communities in East Oakland.
We also believe in breaking silos in the nonprofit world. We’re part of a lot of coalitions. It’s a team effort, partnering with other community-based organizations, or large or small nonprofits, and with the community. For a long time we were all volunteer-run but we now have three full-time staff, including myself. Most of our true passion and mission work is still community-run.
We rely on volunteers and we’ve been able to have volunteers from so many walks of life, which is probably why people are attracted to our volunteer opportunities. Some of our unhoused leaders who are members of the organization want to give back. But we’ll also have Facebook volunteers, Apple volunteers. Salesforce executives volunteer with us. It’s one thing to drive by an encampment or see someone unsheltered at the bus stop. It’s another thing to do something as simple as provide them with food or a care kit, and talk with folks and hear their unique stories — how they got there and how they see their future. Then you can have these hard discussions at your company, or with your family at the dinner table, or with your friends, about “You know, this is what’s really going on in Oakland.”
Lindley Mease: What is your dream? What does the next few years mean for your work?
Candice Elder: We are focused on building our capacity. We do a lot with only three employees. We have been fortunate, since Covid and this renewed awakening on racial justice, that we’ve got a lot of people’s attention in terms of funding. It is mind-boggling and amazing. It is new for us. One thing I’m very grateful about EOC is just how much community support we get, just how many individual donors, how many groups, like your group, wanna take the time to get to know us and see how they can help. That has always been the driving force. We can’t necessarily rely on philanthropy. Their grant-making priorities might change tomorrow, and there goes our funding. It just feels good to be people-backed and community-backed.
We are definitely not interested in becoming a mega nonprofit. Scaling for us really is “how much impact are we making in East Oakland?” How many residents are able to stay here? How many Black and brown businesses are set up? How much revitalization is done? How many resources are brought into the community that weren’t here before? Do we have good council members representing us? How many leaders have we been able to empower? It’s really the people metrics. It doesn’t take that many employees to do that.
My long-term vision is that EOC should only be like 10 employees, tops, as far as the core staff, and then maybe some part-time employees. A lot of the contracts we take, we employ people directly from the community. Jobs and workforce development is a huge part of the issue, of there not being enough jobs, not enough jobs of a living wage so that people can actually afford to live and stay here. We’ve been asked, how can this be duplicated in other neighborhoods. Like, could there be a West Oakland Collective? Or other communities?
Lindley Mease: You have been talking about capacity building among folks in your community. In my experience, it can be hard for folks that don’t organize to know what that means. What does organizing mean to you?
Candice Elder: Our model of organizing is: you meet people where they’re at. Not everyone has the capacity or privilege to attend a city hall meeting in person. East Oakland and downtown Oakland, that doesn’t sound far, but it is, especially if you’re on public transportation, and you’re low income and maybe cannot afford it. So we bring city hall, essentially, to the residents. We believe in new and creative engagement strategies. We’re fans of pop-ups, whether it’s at a corner, on a street, at a church or a liquor store. Wherever people congregate, we come to them.
I think we were the first organization in East Oakland to bring the mayor to the hood and do a workshop on the budget. It was packed. They were like “Oh my god, the mayor is over here on 98th Ave?!” They actually got to see her, they got to ask her questions. That went exceptionally well. But we haven’t seen her since then, and this was years ago.
Organizing is taxing. We are asking the same group of people over and over and over again to organize. We need to be considerate of that, to offer compensation for their time and for their knowledge. Organizing is a privilege. It’s hard to organize if you are worried about keeping a roof over your head and food on the table, and about the safety of your family and your kids. So that’s why we implement a holistic approach to organizing. We ask: “what do you need so you can be fully engaged, to attend this meeting, to go to city hall, to participate in this leadership program? Do you need food for you and your family? Do you need childcare?”
Lindley Mease: How does it feel to be organizing in the broader political moment that we’re in? Of course there’s the election, but also the fires and an increasing recognition of how precarious our economy and our governance systems are.
Candice Elder: We are very hyperlocal. Due to capacity, we are staying out of voter campaigns or GOTV drives, just because we can’t do everything. Of course, we’re always encouraging people to vote, whether it’s at the local level or the national level. We are definitely facing a very important election, but it goes back to what I said about organizing: there’s a whole subset of people who don’t have the privilege to care.
We did census work. If you’re not counted, then that affects federal resources, and that money trickles down to the state and local level, so we can get more resources for housing, for the unhoused community, the housing-insecure communities, etc. But it’s still within our work of making sure the voices of marginalized communities and people are heard, and driving home that you have to be civically engaged. That includes voting, it includes getting to know the candidates and doing your research and education, and it includes encouraging people to run for office and for boards and commissions.
Lindley Mease: You mentioned how things had shifted because of COVID. What have been some of the shifts in your work, at the strategy level and the more practical level?
Candice Elder: We had to suspend our Feed the Hood program, which attracted 500 people each event. With COVID, we can’t have 500 people in a closed gym making sandwiches! Also, we lost access to our food sources. We were rescuing leftover food from tech companies. Because of shelter in place, no one was going into work, so we lost access to that food.
For the first 45 days after the shelter in place orders, we worked every single day to address the deepened food insecurity. We actually expanded our service base from our unhoused community, to our seniors, our low-income families, our disabled and immunocompromised individuals and their families. We applied for more grants and got a bit more funding, and we went from 400 meals a week to over 2000. That’s meals alone. It doesn’t include our farm-to-table produce boxes.
It was the community who supported us, who parted ways with the coveted hand sanitizer, before the local government started donating supplies to us. The community went to their cabinets and their attics and dug up their N95 masks left over from the fires. They supported our Amazon wish list. We were grateful for that. Now, seven months into the pandemic, we have some government contracts to supply emergency food. We’re about to do COVID care kits, so that within 24 hours of a family knowing that a member of their household is COVID-positive, we will be delivering a care package to their doorstep.
Our other programming wasn’t as impacted. At first, our community engagement was on hold, but now we’re starting to have socially distanced community engagement sessions and focus groups, and of course we’re doing stuff by Zoom. We’re now into the groove.
Lindley Mease: You mentioned preventing gentrification or getting ahead of gentrification. I would love to hear you talk about what that means to you.
Candice Elder: For us, getting ahead of the curve on gentrification is revitalizing our neighborhoods. It is preserving the arts, culture, and land. Land is a huge part of it. East Oakland is what we call the last frontier, where there’s still a lot of land and property left. We want to make sure that the land and property is available for the Black and brown, Indigenous, and long-time residents of East Oakland.
We’re part of a lot of coalitions, particularly the Black Cultural Zone in East Oakland. A neighborhood initiative community plan led to a $28M investment into East Oakland to implement six shovel-ready projects including affordable housing and an aquaponics farm in deep East Oakland, which will create more jobs and more food production in the area.
A lot of East Oakland is designated as Opportunity Zones [which provide tax benefits to investors]. We’re making sure the community has a say and a stake in what is going to happen to our land, and we fight for community benefits in commercial development. We do a lot of this in partnership with organizations across Oakland. We’re looking at homeownership, creative ways to use accessory dwelling units, tiny home villages for our unhoused brothers and sisters, how can we take back business, and how we can buy back — or even Black — the block.
We’re also looking into cooperative opportunities. Not everyone is going to be able to buy a house, not everyone’s business is going to be able to get in a brick and mortar tomorrow, maybe not even in a food truck. How do we look at private and commercial ownership on a collective and cooperative level? Our East Oakland SuSu Lending Circle Program is designed to help jump start community knowledge of collective resource pooling. How do we save money together in order to make an even bigger impact, so we can purchase things, we can save, we can alleviate debt, we can jump start business?
LM: You said you don’t want to buy into “the nonprofit industrial complex.” Could you share a little bit about what that means for you and why that’s important?
Candice Elder: It’s really simple. It’s not working in silos. It’s not being competitive with other nonprofit organizations. It’s not leading with a scarcity mindset. There’s enough funding and resources out there for all of us. We don’t have to be competitive with one another. That’s what EOC does. Our collaboration is authentic and genuine. We all have a collective goal, and that is to make impact and change in our most vulnerable communities.
LM: Kickass! I’m really moved by your work, Candice. Thank you for sharing your story with our membership.
