Service Born of Love for A City

The New Mosswood Recreation Center and The Community Vision of Oakland Natives Give Back

By: Nina Foushee, Communications and Policy Manager at Oakland Natives Give Back

Early last month, around 40 people packed into a white tent in Oakland, CA’s Mosswood Park while a torrent of rain turned the park grounds to swamp. Elected officials, Oakland Parks and Recreation staff, and community members from various sectors braved the rain to discuss plans for the new Mosswood Recreation Center, which will replace the original building that burned down in November.

On one side of the tent, two easels were set up with pieces of butcher paper — one was marked “Programs,” and one was marked “Park/Open Spaces.” Throughout the event, Oakland Parks and Recreation staff encouraged attendees to go up to each easel and write down their ideas.

During the portion of the event dedicated to speeches, Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf spoke of herself as someone raised not only in the City of Oakland but by the city of Oakland — she went on to characterize Oakland as a place of “creativity, brilliance, and scrappiness.”

Days before writing this post, I spoke to the Oakland Natives Give Back (ONGB) executive director, Dr. Nyeisha DeWitt, about the organization’s “community vision.” Mayor Schaaf’s speech, about responding to loss while developing plans for a new recreation center, reflected many of the themes that Dr. DeWitt discussed:

• The value of committing to something bigger than oneself, especially in times of despair.
• The importance of developing a concrete and shared vision not only for individual projects in Oakland, but for the city of Oakland as a whole.
• The power of having a sense of pride in a shared, place-based identity, and using that identity as a motivation for service.
• A conception of community leadership that prioritizes connecting people to opportunities for service to the city.
• The need for leaders to approach citywide problems as opportunities to channel the creative power of a community.

After the speeches, I spoke to Diane Boyd, the executive assistant to Oakland Parks and Recreation Director Nicholas Williams. She noted that the parks and recreation department is in the process of shifting from simply focusing on maintaining facilities and providing programs — what Boyd described as an “internal” focus — to a “youth development” focus. Boyd used basketball as an example. She said that the parks and recreation department can host a basketball program, but the department goal is not simply to give kids an opportunity to play a sport; rather, the goal is to make kids understand the value of teamwork, and of practice, and of doing something constructive with their time. Oakland Natives Give Back is proud to partner with Oakland Parks and Recreation to provide high-quality extracurricular activities for Oakland public school children.

I thought about Boyd’s words as I listened to other community members speak about their ideas for the future Mosswood Recreation Center. Ideally, the center will not only provide quality activities to Oakland youth, but help steer Oakland’s next generation in the right direction. As an organization, Oakland Natives Give Back strives to do the same.

For more information about Oakland Natives Give Back, please visit: www.oaklandnatives.org