Community-Determined Youth Organizing with JP of Homies Empowerment

Blue Heart had a chance to connect with JP of Homies Empowerment about their journey to the organization and how they build power among Oakland youth.

Lindley Mease: Can you share your story, where you are from, and how you came into this work?

JP Hailer: I am from southern Arizona. I grew up in Tucson and Tempe — which is basically Phoenix. I came to the Bay Area in 2005 with the intention of going to law school and I ended up going to business school instead. I focused on cooperative economics and workforce development. I was really lucky to leave with a job in workforce development and nonprofit, but I very quickly wanted to get out. I saw it as paternalistic, funding outcome based stuff, really driven by the Department of Labor — especially in the workforce development space.

So I went to work for a workforce development intermediary. We worked with community colleges, industry and young people to create college pathway programs attached to jobs. That was a little bit more fun and more dynamic, and felt more student focused. In that experience I still felt I wanted to do something more community-based and a bit more empowering.

So a friend and I started a for-profit organization that was a food business that trained young people in culinary skills that also had a college pathway program. It’s still running today, but we’re not a part of it anymore.

Through that work, I met Dr. Cesar Cruz, who started Homies Empowerment. He’s one of the co-founders and we started talking about partnering on a community-led café project. I finally felt an alignment in all of the ways I’m working. And I wasn’t having to leave parts of my own integrity behind.

While we were having those conversations with Homies and with the community, the pandemic hit and we started our FREEdom Store to feed folks.

We started seeing the need in the community for basic necessities. And so we started! The second week of the pandemic, we served about 150 people. By the next month, we were seeing 1,500 individuals; four hundred and fifty families a week. Quickly we went from four of us to twenty-six of us doing the work and building our staff up exponentially.

Now we are trying to figure out how to move that work into something more sustainable and not just do survival programs, but thriving programs. We recently leased some land in the city of Oakland and we’re going to be growing food alongside community members. We still have this cafe project on the back burner. Before I met Dr. Cruz, Homies was already developing a high school and that work is still being done too. It’s going to be open next year.

These are youth empowerment, community empowerment programs, with the idea of a thriving, self-sufficient local community that has everything it needs, except maybe some of the resources that other communities are lucky enough to have.

We’re trying to figure out how we design and organize so that this community of East Oakland has and is able to live into some of the dreams the community already had. We’re getting there, we’re getting there slowly and [JP laughs] actually not even slowly, very quickly.

In the last couple of years, a lot of things have happened in all of the right ways. We’re now in a real spot of trying to ground all of our ideas and make them happen.

LM: I would love for you to take us into your East Oakland. Can you describe how it is, how it smells, and what it looks like to be there?

JP: It’s a really resilient community of folks. I think that one of the things we often say is, “It’s our family.” It’s our uncles, our aunties and our grandmothers standing in line and figuring out a way to resource their families themselves. That’s really powerful. These are heroes. Our staff and our organization are part of the community. It’s not separate — we’re not separate from them. There’s a lot of joy. A lot of food. A lot of music. We’ve recently started other free food programs; one for our curbside communities and a school free breakfast program for children. There’s a lot of love and heart. Joy — in the work, too.

LM: You are truly a community-based organization. You’re embedded and you’re hearing these needs and responding to them. You’re building programs to really meet the community where they’re at. Can you tell us a story about what it looks like to identify a community need and then respond to it? How is that connected with a political view of what it means to build power or momentum in your community?

JP: There is no difficulty in seeing and responding to a need. Everyone in the organization is in the community, living, working, a part of it. In that way, the life experiences of staff are the same as all of our neighbors. The free breakfast program came out of one of our folks saying, “The school breakfasts are unhealthy and not delicious, and the children don’t want to eat them. It’s one of their only meals out of the day, what can we do?” This is a mother, a community volunteer, a staff person saying this. We were able to go to some of our funders and ask for resources so that we can have a healthy breakfast while kids are on their way to school. That’s the kind of thing that consistently happens. It is an organic process, based on community trust.

When we started, we hired a care team. We don’t call them case managers, because we don’t see people as “cases.” That came out of community trust; coming to us for not only food and diapers, but also situations like, “I can’t pay my rent because my husband hasn’t been working because of COVID,” or “We lost our housing,” or “My car was hit and I have no way to get to work.” Folks had trust in us and with us, and so we were able to start developing resources and ways to start supporting communities. We responded, “Let’s hire people so that we have folks who can do this work directly.”

Another story is that a lot of folks are coming to us and saying, “We don’t need resources, we need cash. We need to be able to pay our phone bill.” We were able to go to a funder and get eighty-five thousand dollars so that we could give cash aid to folks. It’s one thing to have food stamps and to be able to get free food, but you also need gas and other things to keep your life going. That’s something we’ve done two years in a row now. We’ve done huge Christmas events to get children toys and food. We see the community and they see us as a resource. Another example is the land we just leased. Folks said that they wanted to grow their own food.

In terms of this work being a part of a larger movement, I think COVID showed a lot of us what it looks like to be dependent on the erratic capitalist system. What it looks like to be tied to that when you are in a situation of being paid cash under the table or when you aren’t living in a stable housing situation; what happens when certain decisions are out of your control. So we are thinking about how we create a community that is more in control of all of the means of production and the resources, and can be even more resilient in the current ecosystem we’re living in, of capitalism.

We are building or trying to accomplish community self-sufficiency and community empowerment based on the needs the community feels they have — not what other folks, like funders or the government have decided.

LM: Is there anything else you want to share about your programs and what you’ve built that you’re particularly excited about?

JP: What’s most beautiful is that we started with reacting to the circumstances folks were in and creating survival programs, like the free breakfast program, the programs for curbside communities, and the FREEdom store — all still survival programs. But now we got the land so that we could grow our own food. We’re hoping to resource our cafe with that. Food in that cafe will probably have a sliding scale, but we’ll provide jobs, training, and healthy food. We’re hoping that the FREEdom store eventually transitions, at least partially, into a healthy market or a farmer’s market, where some folks pay, but not everybody has to.

We are creating ways of shifting from a survival model to a thriving community-led model.

That’s what I get the most excited about — using this moment as an opportunity to build a new ecosystem. We’ve really seen it happen in the mutual aid that’s existed over this time. We could not be doing this by ourselves. A lot of restaurants, a lot of farmers, a lot of food distributors, a lot of other non-profits that have supplies, like diapers, all of this, has happened with amazing partnerships. It’s the least competitive atmosphere I’ve ever seen in the nonprofit world. And I think it has really inspired people. All of these programs and projects have come out of it. I get really, really excited about the potential, especially in Oakland, for a different way of organizing around the community.

LM: We try to shine a light on how community-based organizations get looked over because of racism or because they’re doing radical work that’s deeply challenging the status quo and how systems operate. Are there difficulties that you’ve faced in getting resourced? What are some of the ways that you’ve found ways around that?

JP: I will answer that question a little differently in order to really shine a light on some of the things you mentioned.

We’ve never had city funding or had anyone really paying attention to the work that we’re doing. Now that we’re sort of on the radar, folks are showing up, taking photos and doing these kinds of things. That’s been interesting to see, enlightening to see.

Also, we have said “no” to funding — depending on our values. And that’s not an easy thing to do as a small organization that feels responsible for a lot of folks — community folks, staff folks, and continuing the work. For example, Wells Fargo came to us and wanted to give us funds and we said “no” because of the impact they’ve had on this community. They have blood on their hands for some of the conditions that are existing now. We politely declined and explained why we were saying that. We made sure that they understood why we were saying “no.”

There’s a lot of politics with all things and especially with funding and resources. There’ve been some organizations around for a long time and they just automatically get funds because folks know who they are, it’s easy and trusted, and they don’t have to do extra work. That happens a lot, but we feel very grateful that we’ve had a lot of support over the last two years. Philanthropy seems to be shifting, at least in this moment, folks are interested in hearing what we need versus what they imagine the outcome should be. Funders are requiring less and

they’re having a conversation with us. For example, saying, “Give us a one pager. Give us a concept paper versus all these complex budgets.” I think they’re recognizing and saying that the work being done is what matters.

Dignity is really, really valuable and important. I’ve been a grant writer for a long time and one of the things that is very demoralizing is to consistently have to be explaining to people why they should be giving and supporting things that are so critical, important and obvious. It can be a very demoralizing process, and I feel like that message is starting to get heard. I would encourage all people who have the opportunity to give, to understand that idea.

LM: Connected to that, what are some of the things that you’ve seen people in the broader, lay community do and you’ve thought, “Oh my God, don’t do that!”? And what are some things that make you say, “Yes! Do that!”?

JP: One of our big things is solidarity, not charity. This is the idea that our freedom and our liberty is tied up with one another.

If that is a concept that folks don’t understand, it’s something we feel very sensitive about and I don’t know if it’s something we can explain. I think folks have to explore that idea. What does it really mean that we’re all connected and tied to one another?

It’s always a tricky thing for me to explain the charity thing, but it is something that we feel really strongly about and have had a lot of really complicated and difficult conversations with folks about it.

LM: I think the key philanthropy issue for me is how do we collectively recognize our stake in transforming systems. It’s the difference between moving money to be more helpful versus moving money in order to transform.