California’s Franchise Tax Board (FTB) is expecting about 825,000 low-income working taxpayers to qualify for an average refundable credit of $460 through the state’s new Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). As of last month, 26 states and the District of Columbia have established their own EITC’s as a supplement to the federal poverty-reduction measure; more [...]
Opening up government data has the potential to engage residents, increase accountability and spur new uses of data. As one of the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership’s founding members, Urban Strategies Council has used data as a tool to improve low-income communities for almost three decades. This week we're releasing a case study on the City [...]
The digital divide is a very real and very stable reality in communities like Oakland, California. Knowing which neighborhoods have solid access to high speed internet is a critical aspect of planning for government and nonprofit provided online services- if we want low income folks from Oakland's flatlands to use a new digital application, we'd [...]
WORLD Channel, series America ReFramed and the filmmakers of Come Hell or High Water: The Battle for Turkey Creek invite you to join them for an online screening and live chat simulcast with the film's national broadcast. Come Hell or High Water: The Battle for Turkey Creek follows the journey of Derrick Evans, who moves [...]
If you'd prefer to never see this kind of mess happening Oakland you should join Oakland Votes and many residents of the city to work on the creation of an independent Redistricting Commission for our city! Details on the flyer below. This will be a ballot measure this November assuming that city council passes it. [...]
As part of our work in supporting the Alameda County Violence Prevention Initiative we recently produced an update of our county Violence Fact Sheet. According to the 2012 uniform crime reports, Alameda County had higher rates of violent crime than California and the Nation. Over the past decade, 2003 to 2013, Alameda County has become [...]
After a successful year in 2013 we wanted to share with you our newly released report that provides a powerful overview of the work necessary to protect our voting rights in Oakland. The Oakland Votes Redistricting Coalition (OVRC) is a coalition of organizations and activists who fought to defend voting rights in our city in [...]
In recent weeks we’ve heard from many concerned residents of Oakland that they would like to know more about our “report that shows the DAC and cameras will reduce crime”. We rarely feel compelled to correct public misinformation about our work but we feel that this is an important issue and our organization’s reputation is [...]
The Healthy Stores for Healthy Communities campaign just released the results of their statewide surveys. We've included their factsheet for Alameda County below as it contains some useful data on our communities here. More than 7,000 stores were surveyed in all 58 California counties, which included convenience, supermarket, liquor, tobacco, small market, discount, drug and [...]
The Eden Area Community Profile 2013 was commissioned by Alameda County Supervisor Nate Miley to provide both a new baseline for understanding the five diverse communities in the Eden Area and to evaluate the changes since the initial profile was prepared. It is intended to support the work of Phase II of the Eden Area [...]