EBALDC’s 48th Annual Gala Celebrated a Rich History of Community Leadership
On a warm late summer evening, Thursday, September 7th, EBALDC supporters, staff, board, and residents gathered at Preservation Park for our Annual Gala to celebrate 48 years of providing affordable housing and building healthy Oakland and East Bay neighborhoods. Guests wandered through the outdoor courtyard surrounded by the facades of Preservation Park’s Victorian buildings, leafy oak trees, and spreading palms, with the melodious tones of Destiny Muhammad’s harp playing and the central fountain’s burbling in the background.
L-R: SPARC Newspaper team Keith Arivnwine, Tyra Rhodes, Sister CC, Jesse Williams and Anne Bradley, Annie Ledbury, Associate Director, Creative Community Development
The event showcased EBALDC’s history of supporting residents, building their leadership skills, and providing them with programs and resources to thrive. Emphasizing the importance of resident leadership in the design and support of our Building Healthy Neighborhoods approach, the evening’s emcee Michael Tate noted that EBALDC is “community-centered and culturally humble…an organization [that] meet[s] people where they are in need.”
Interim CEO Lina Sheth & Board Vice Chair Leslie Francis
Board President Kelly Drumm
As Oakland’s largest provider of affordable housing, “[o]ur vision is to build healthy neighborhoods and we do this through partnership” said Board President Kelly Drumm. Lina Sheth, EBALDC’s Interim CEO, noted EBALDC’s “community building…makes my city [Oakland] more vibrant.” Juan Salinas, a client of EBALDC’s SparkPoint Oakland collaborative, spoke of his personal journey going from the kitchens and classrooms at Laney College as an older student to getting connected to a SparkPoint financial coach who helped him review his finances, create a budget, and—over time—to develop habits that made him financially responsible and helped him plan for personal goals.
Juan Salinas, SparkPoint Oakland client, and Richard Quach, Board Member
Healthy Neighborhoods Pillar Award honoree Beth Rosales, current EBALDC board member (and a board member in the early days), is retired from a long and illustrious career working towards social justice in and through philanthropy. Up until now, said Beth, “it was my lifetime choice and preference to work in the background without fanfare.” With nudging from board member Agnes Ubalde, Beth finally agreed to accept this award—the first time she has accepted an award in her honor. A longtime EBALDC resident, Beth spoke movingly about an incident in which EBALDC supported her and her fellow residents in standing up for the safety of LGBTQ residents and their allies.
Healthy Neighborhoods Pillar Award Honoree Beth Rosales and Board Member Sean Sullivan
Ener Chiu, Executive Vice President of Community Building, and Healthy Neighborhoods Pillar Honoree Dr. Russell Jeung
While our second Healthy Neighborhoods Pillar Award honoree, Dr. Russell Jeung, is best known as a Professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University and Time Magazine’s top 100 Most Influential People in the World for co-founding Stop AAPI Hate in 2020, EBALDC knows Dr. Jeung from his resident organizing work at Oakland’s Oak Park Apartments in the 1990s, when he helped lead his neighbors — largely Lao and Cambodian refugees – to win a lawsuit against a terrible landlord and helped shepherd the eventual sale and rehab of that property to EBALDC and Affordable Housing Associates. Dr. Jeung’s remarks connected the dots from structural hate and racism built into systems of inadequate housing to “mass incarceration that results in mass separation from families to mass deportation that results in mass separation from families” and invited the audience to imagine systems in which youth can grow into their full potential.
Lynette Jung Lee Resident Leadership Award Honoree Alice Chan
Nairobi Barnes, 2023 Oakland Youth Poet Laureate
Our Lynette Jung Lee Resident Leadership Award honoree Alice Chan spoke with conviction about the impact that EBALDC’s staff had on her confidence.
Although she had lived in Noble Tower for 15 years, “I always stayed invisible—never participated in any events. During the shelter-in-place, I started participating in one event [volunteering for food distributions], and suddenly they noticed me and asked me to participate in Resident Leadership Council activities,” becoming Vice President of the RLC in 2022 and then President in 2023. Her pride in her volunteer work for EBALDC was evident as she spoke of the joy of “helping seniors to live happy and healthy golden years.”
Local artists provided inspiration to those assembled. Oakland Youth Poet Laureate Nairobi Barnes’s poetry issued a challenge to consider “the promise of the land of the free” and asked, “Why can’t I be Black and deserve a life that is livable?”
Against the backdrop of a setting sun, the artist Natty Rebel (also known as Andre Jones, founder of the Bay Area Mural Program), did a live painting that was later auctioned off and donated by a bidder to be showcased at EBALDC’s West Oakland development project, The Phoenix.
Starting with a blank canvas, Natty Rebel created a vibrant painting of a phoenix rising above a waterway reminiscent of the San Francisco Bay. With the phoenix in flight under dark clouds up above, and a golden sun lighting up the water and distant hills behind with a brilliant salmon hue, the painting provided a beautiful suggestion of hope on the horizon.
Photo credits: Malcolm Wallace
To view the photos from EBALDC’s 48th Annual Gala Celebration click here.