Rashidah Grinage
Director, People United for a Better Life in Oakland (PUEBLO)
“I decided that I needed to get involved to fix the situation.”
Danielle: Hi, Rashidah. I’m Danielle. I’m Ana’s peer. I major in environmental analysis. Do you want to introduce yourself?
Ana: Yes. I’m Ana. As you know, I’m an engineering student. We’re doing an interview for a class called Global Environmental Politics, and we’re interested in gathering stories and insights from local leaders who have a lot of experience working to promote sustainability and bring about change
Rashidah: Okay.
Danielle: To begin with we were just hoping if you could tell us a little bit about your background, what you would identify as some of the most important initiatives or projects or struggles, or really anything that you’ve encountered in trying to promote change in your community. Then we’ll use that as a source for some follow up questions to get some insights as to what you think it takes to bring about change at the local level. With your permission, we’ll record this conversation on our phone, type it up, delete the recording, send you the transcript for your approval before posting it on our password-protected website. Is that okay with you?
R: Sure.
D: Okay. Great. So, to begin with, could you please tell us a little bit about what you do?
R: Well, what I have been doing, being the director of this organization, People United for a Better Life in Oakland, for about seven years, I’m about to step down because I want to do policy work, specifically in the criminal justice system area, and the administrative duties have been growing. I haven’t been really able to focus enough on policy work.
In respect to the environmental work that we have done, I would say that most of our programs began about 2007, and they began with what we called the Urban Youth Harvest program. That was a program that I initiated in response to three issues that seemed to me to be interconnected.
One of which is that Oakland has an abundance of fruit trees of all kinds. We have an ideal climate, and we have citrus fruits, apples, pears, peaches, pomegranates, persimmons…all kinds, I mean…lychees…I mean, it’s almost unlimited in what type of fruit we have here, except for really tropical fruits. But a lot of people, including myself, have several fruit trees, but we have been unable to successfully harvest them–plums in particular. There is a huge number of plum trees in Oakland, and, because they have such thin skin, when they fall, they squeeze flatter, unlike other fruit that falls to the ground and is still usable. I had a difficult time harvesting all of my plums before they became a mess, and it occurred to me that probably a lot of other people did too, which meant that a lot of wasted fruit. This fruit was organic, because most people I know don’t spray. The fruit was going to waste, so that was the issue. A lot of fresh, organic produce was just completely being wasted.
A second issue is that, around that time, we saw cutbacks in allocations for seniors. They were getting less in food stamps, food prices were going up, and, in general, it made it harder than ever for seniors living on a fixed income to eat healthy. Particularly with respect to fresh produce, which was relatively expensive compared to…carbohydrates, for example. This contributed to poor outcomes in health for a lot of our senior citizens, particularly those of low-income levels, especially if they had complication issues such as diabetes, cholesterol, or whatever. That was the second impact.
The third impact was that we had a growing number of teenagers who didn’t have summer work.
So, it seemed to me that we should be able to figure out a way to combine all of these problems. We could get teenagers to harvest this fruit and then take it to low-income seniors. That became the basis for the Urban Youth Harvest program. It didn’t cost a whole lot of money to run because we didn’t have to pay an enormous amount to the teenagers.
That’s when we launched that program. That’s one of the programs that has actually not expanded in the way that we hoped it would, but we’re still trying to get a little bit more funding so that we can do a better job of outreach and get more fruit donors and actually increase the amount of fruit that we’re working with.
D: Okay. Why has that program not expanded the way you thought it would?
R: We have not written grants for it, particularly. What has happened, is that we expanded our focus to teaching kids how to grow food, particularly within the context of school gardens, which has become a big field. Also within the context of teaching kids how to cook healthy meals, particularly using the vegetables that they are growing—how to prepare them. There has been a big emphasis on improving school lunches, and improving the diets of young people in schools, and giving them the tools that they need to learn how to grow food and to understand the benefit to eating that type of food instead of fast food. Most of our grant money has been in programs that do that work.
D: You mentioned that you are trying to improve school lunches. Are you doing that via education of the students or helping the school source better food?
R: Well, the school that we are working with is mainly Castlemont High School, which is in East Oakland, which is a major food desert area. Castlemont has had a school garden for quite a long time now. The idea is that kids work in the garden, and that they then create menus based on what been growing on the gardens, and they learn how to cook. There’s a teacher there that teaches culinary, and the kids learn how to prepare what grows in the garden and create menus for school lunches.
A: Have you ever received any pushback from the community or people in the government for the program itself?
R: No, none at all. No, it’s unlike a lot of the other work we do, especially around police issues. In this instance, there is no pushback at all. Everyone appears to understand the need for better food, for greater healthy food access, particularly for low-income people. You know, we have large areas of Oakland where we don’t have any liable supermarket. You know, the only thing within walking distance is a liquor store. So, I think that there is a wide recognition in Oakland, that there is definitely a need for the more creative community-based approach to providing healthy food access.
D: You mentioned that you wanted to focus more on policy. What kind of policy do you want to focus on?
R: I personally have been working on police accountability. Every time that there is a big event, like we are about to witness in Fergusson as a result of the Michael Brown case and like last year with Trayvon Martin and before that we saw it with Oscar Grant, all these cases where young, black men are being killed by police and there are all types of outrage and all kinds of protests and stuff. When they all die down, every thing goes back to the way it was before because there is no policy change that resulted from all of that activity. My approach is to try to make a coalition that can actually move a policy that creates a greater and more meaningful oversight over the police—that has the ability to discipline the police, and that has the ability to influence police practices and police policies. That’s what I really want to focus on.
We’ve already built up a coalition called the Coalition of Police Accountability. We’ve drafted what we have hoped would be in the ballot for November, but it was not. It was blocked by the police opposition association to pressure the city council into not putting it on the ballot. But, we are also under federal oversight, as a result of a class action lawsuit, and we are hoping to use that as a leverage as well to figure out a way to create this independent body that would oversee the police department and provide a meaningful discipline when needed.
D: I’m sorry, what was that federal…?
R: If you do your research in their website, what you will learn is that—Ana can probably tell you more about that—in 2003 there was a class action lawsuit file by two civil law attorneys, Jim Chanin and John Burris –dubbed The Rider’s Case. It was a class action concerning about 119 plaintiffs, and they were complaining about 19 police officers, all of whom had either kidnapped, planted drugs, beat them up, or done other illegal things to them. This lawsuit settled that as a condition of the settlement, the plaintiff’s attorneys required that the city began a set of reforms, known as the Negotiated Settlement Agreement (NSA). These reforms mandated by the plaintiff’s attorneys went to the issues that gave rights to the beginning. This settlement agreement was signed by the city and the plaintiff’s attorneys and is being overseen by a federal judge. It was supposed to be done—all of these reforms were to be completed in five years. We are now entering the 13th year, and they are still not in compliance.
We have been working with the monitor who recommended us to the judge as well as the plaintiff’s attorneys, trying to see if there is some way that we can use this mechanism that—in other words, as a condition for releasing the city from this agreement, the city has to agree to provide this oversight body that we are wanting. We are trying different strategies to see what is going to work and what is going to get us much more prosperous. We have a City’s Police Review Board, but the problem is that it doesn’t have the authority to enforce discipline. It can only recommend it. We are trying to give it that authority.
D: What are some other strategies that you are using to get this policy put in place?
R: Well, we did not get it in the 2014 ballot, so the next opportunity will be the 2016 ballot. If it comes to that, and if we haven’t found any other way to get this objective met, we will probably get involved into getting into voter registration and immediate outreach to the community to make sure that the kind of voters that would vote for this are registered to vote and do vote.
D: Could you expand a little bit more about the pushback that you have received or seen by the police?
R: Well, they have been, historically—and not just in Oakland, but throughout the United States—every time a city tries to create a civilian oversight mechanism to investigate complaints, the police association and police unions fight back. Thy really, really oppose civilians being placed in a position of judging police officers. They believe that, because civilians have never been in the shoes of a police officer and faced with unpredictable situations where they have to react quickly and that there is danger and that their lives are in jeopardy, they believe that until somebody has been in that position, they have not justified in passing judgment in officer’s conduct. They don’t trust civilians, essentially, to be able to assess whether or not an officer has acted inappropriately. Therefore, they resist to the maximum. Every jurisdiction that has tried to create a civilian investigative body has seen this. That is the kind of pushback that we have received from the beginning. It doesn’t surprise us. We have seen this over the last twenty years, and we expect that we will continue to see it. The only leverage that we have in this case, is that we have the leverage of a federal judge, and that, ultimately, have the leverage of voters. That’s what it takes to overcome that type of resistance. The other thing it takes is a lot of resources because there is no question that if we were able to get this on the ballot, the police officer’s association would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to defeat it. It would have a major, major campaign with brochures and flyers and all types of advertisements probably even TV ads that would appeal to the worst fears of voters. Like, “If this passes, our Oakland officers will move to another community, and then there will be nobody to protect you,” and that kind of stuff. We have every reason to believe that that is exactly what they will do if we happen to get it on the ballot. We would then also have to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars, and most of us in this coalition are not in the position to do that. This is problematic. So, if there is a way of getting it done without going to the ballot, we would prefer to do it.
D: I’m sorry, how are you getting this done without getting to the ballot?
R: Well, we don’t know if it will be successful or not, but what we are trying to do is to use the leverage of the city’s desire to end the settlement agreement, to end this negotiated agreement, which is costing them a lot of money every year. They want this thing to end. They want to be in compliance and have this thing over with. We are hoping to somehow establish with the judge and with the plaintiff’s attorneys that if we were to let the city off the hook, that it should be required to establish this commission to prevent further misconduct that led to this in the first place. We are trying to use the leverage of this negotiated settlement agreement to see whether or not we can get as a condition of letting the city off the hook and closing out that agreement, that we require to put in place this mechanism.
D: I think that Ana also mentioned another program that she worked with, working with the youth who worked with officers.
A: I mentioned OYPB—Oakland Youth Policy Builders. Just to recap, when I was working in it, we were a group of youth, and we were trying to get the police officers to hand out their business cards with their name and badge numbers to people they interacted with, mostly with youth. That way, the youth could have a chance to complain to CPRB—Citizen’s Public Review Board—if they were harassed or if something went wrong. However, I left before anything got a concrete finish. Would you like to give more of what happened?
R: So, after you left, we did in fact get that policy passed. We have now a written policy that OPD trains its officers in. What we have not been able to do yet, is a successful outreach to students in their schools to let students know about this. So our current OYPB group will start working on that, starting in January. Right now, they have been learning more about the background, about police issues in general and the reasons why they are involved in so many issues including racial profiling and the disproportionate number of police-involved killings that involve young people of color. So they have been more in a form of education mode, but starting in January, they will start with more outreach and presentations to schools so that kids know that they should be getting this business card whenever they are being asked for their identification. They should expect to receive a card saying who the officer is, and on the back, how to file a complaint if the officer behaves inappropriately. We also need to train them that if they don’t receive the card, that they need to call us and let us know and that we will help them file a complaint because they should have gotten the card.
D: I’m sorry, I’m not as familiar with this as Ana. What was the policy that was changed relating to OYPB?
R: Ana, you can explain that.
A: So what happened was that a lot of youth were getting…There is citizen’s review board that takes complaints of officers acting unjustly to other people. There are a lot of issues between youth and police officers, but there has not been any way to fix them, so the idea for OYPB was to get the officers to give their identification to youth so that better relationships could be formed. That way, if the youth had a bad experience, the youth could file a report. The officers don’t get punished for each individual report, but if a singular officer has a lot of complaints for doing something wrong, then he or she has to go through some training to get back, or something else happens to prevent future problems.
D: So the policy made sure that the police gave their cards to everyone they interacted with?
R: No. Let’s say that they come up with some youth hanging around, and the police ask for some ID. Every time that they ask for a young person’s ID, they are supposed to provide their own.
D: Oh, I see.
R: So it’s kind of like an even trade. And on the back of the card is information about how to file a complaint and also how to give a compliment. So it empowers the young person, and it allows them a way to have a better experience with the officer. A lot of times, particularly young people—but it’s really all people—, don’t file a complaint because they don’t know who the officer is—they didn’t get his name. They feel like that is a barrier to getting to file a complaint because when they are asked who the officer was, they don’t know. So they don’t even bother to file a complaint. That’s one of the things that is contributing to officers that have no incentive to change, that have no incentive to get better, because they have no consequence to doing what they are doing. So f they are treating people rudely, if they are racially profiling, if they are stopping people without a good reason, and nothing bad happens to them as a result of doing all of these things, there is no reason for them to stop doing what they are doing. That’s what we mean by accountability—that there is no way to hold anyone accountable unless you are prepared to have consequences for failures to perform at a certain level. If there are no consequences, the person will continue to behave in that way.
D: What were some of the hurdles that you encountered when you tried to get this policy implemented?
R: Well, I don’t think there were that many hurdles. I think that Ana can tell you that there were some issues around the design of the card, there were some issues around what kind of information would be put in the back of the card. The first time they did the design, they had so many phone numbers to call on the back that you could not really figure out the number for a complaint. It was kind of hidden with all of the other numbers that were there. We basically objected to that, so they fixed that, they took all the other numbers off, but we did agree that they could add a number for giving out compliments for the officers. If you had a good experience with the officer and you want to convey that, there would be a number to call or an email to address. We agreed to that.
But then there was the issue that, as you questioned me before, we can’t give a card to every single individual we meet everyday because that would be hundreds of thousands of cards. We had to figure out what the threshold or trigger would be for the officer to be obligated to give out a card. One thing we wanted to make sure of was that it was not the responsibility of the young person to ask for the card, that it was the responsibility of the officer to provide it without being asked. We were very firm about that.
A: You said that the policy has been implemented, right?
R: It’s enforced. What I mean is that the policy exists and that the officers have been trained in it. Whether or not they are doing it is another matter. That is why we need to do a better outreach to the community so that more people know that they should expect to get the card. They should also know that if they don’t get it, they need to report it because that is the only way we will know whether the policy is really in place.
A: So from the people that do know about the cards, have you seen a significant change in the relations between the police and, say, youth?
R: Premature. Premature. We don’t have the data for that. We can’t draw any data yet because we haven’t done a good enough job of establishing, of getting the word out to young people and making sure that they report to us if they don’t get a card. Until that happens, we have no way of knowing who is getting cards and who isn’t.
A: Okay, so that’s the next step.
R: Yeah.
D: Along with all of this, but this is a big picture question…you kind of talked of it a little when referring to needing resources and money to backing a lot of your initiatives. I’m not sure if that’s the answer to my question, but the question is what is one of the biggest obstacles that you have overcome is? Or maybe not a singular big obstacle, but something that you keep coming across your various initiatives?
R: Well, that is really what it is—underfunding. I mean, there are not a lot of funders who fund this type of funding at all. So most of this work has been done by me as a volunteer. One of the challenges for this year is going to be trying to find funding for this program. It shouldn’t have to be run on a volunteer basis. That’s going to be a big priority for us next year.
A: How do you get started with PUEBLO or with this type of work?
R: Well, I started with PUEBLO as a member. The reason I cam to PUEBLO was because of personal trouble. I decided that I needed to get involved to fix the situation, and so I joined PUEBLO as a member in the mid-nineties. Eventually, in 2007, I became the director.
A: Through this line of work, do you consider yourself to be a change maker in the Oakland community?
R: I think that the Oakland community is in a better place to answer that than I am. I would say that that is what I aspire to be. I think I’ve made some contributions to that, and I’m hoping to make a lot more before I retire entirely from it.
A: When you start these programs, like you mentioned for Urban Youth Harvest, which you started by seeing wasted fruit? How do you notice, or how do you identify these problems in the community and how do you go about building the program to change it?
R: I say that it depends on the program. There are so many needs in this community that it is a never-ending process. At some point, we need to learn…What we have to do is look at our mission statement, what is PUEBLO’s mission and try to look at what we’re trying to do, what areas we have the expertise, where we have the capacity to make a change in terms of the people that we have and in terms of the amount of resources that we have. And then, part of it is can we get grant money for it or can we get a contract with the county or with the city or somewhere to provide whatever it is that we are trying to work on. So, there are a lot of variables that go into it and that determine what is doable for us and what isn’t doable for us.
So far, the deals of our emphasis on the food issues; including growing it, learning how to cook healthy meals, providing better access to food for people that lack that at the moment; food justice; training for young people; youth leadership training; and police accountability. Those are our chief areas, but we also have now two programs where we are looking at people who have been incarcerated and looking into providing services for them to help them get back on track.
So we have one program that deals with youth who were on probation or in foster care. We do job placement, education, workshops, and case management to basically help these kids have better options so that they don’t recommit and find themselves back in the system. We also have a program where we have people that are coming back from Santa Rita—trying to get them get a fresh start.
There are endless numbers of things that have to be fixed, and we’re just trying to meet the needs based on what we can, based on the kind of support we get, the kinds of grants that we are able to get, and the contracts that we are able to find.
D: This is a little off topic, but I used to work with a social enterprise based out of Claremont, run by a Scripps professor, called Falling Fruit for Rising Women. It sounds exactly like, or very, very similar to what you have been doing with the Urban Youth Harvest Program and also with this new program you just mentioned—working with previously incarcerated people, helping them get back/get reintegrated back into society. It’s a really great program. We recommend that you look it up, if they have anything up. It’s fairly new, Falling Fruit for Rising Women. But I was just wondering…these programs are so similar and they’re taking place in different—not so far from each other—but definitely in different cities from each other. Have you looked into working with each other, or into uniting initiatives with cities that are doing similar things…maybe building off of each other, or maybe even sharing grants?
R: Yeah, that is kind of hard to do because…especially when you are doing direct service, it has to do within your own community. You have to show what your deliverables have, who you have impacted…I mean, we belong to different coalitions and different networks, and we certainly share information, but that is not the way that funding operates, really, within each jurisdiction.
A: So, for some programs, say for Urban Youth Harvest in this case, have you seen significant change in the community due to its influence?
R: No, because we have not expanded it to that scale. It’s a very, very good concept, but we haven’t reached a scale that we would be able to assess impact. We don’t have enough fruit donors, not enough recipients, and not enough data collection to be able to really demonstrate impact in a really scientific way. We would have to do a lot more in collecting information from our recipients, knowing what their health conditions were, and being able to document the extent to which their health improved. That would be very difficult, especially because we are not dealing with a year round program, either. Fruit season is generally starting in June and goes to November, and then there is very little that happens between December and June. So a person might improve their health during the time that the program was running, but then, for the next six months, they might not receive fruit, so their health might deteriorate. It’s pretty problematic to really be able to assess impact in that way.
I think the impacts are far more social, maybe, than health, entirely. I think that it’s more about neighbors benefitting other neighbors in Oakland, others less fortunate than them. The people with trees that are able to donate their property to people that are living in senior shelters and have no jobs and are on their own and can’t grow their own fruit. I think that there is a social aspect to it that is as important as the physical health aspect, including community building. I think for young people as well—it’s very meaningful work. They’re getting paid for it, but it’s very difficult kind of work than filing papers or flipping burgers. It’s something that they know that they are contributing for the betterment of the community when they are doing that work.
D: Do you think that that’s a hurdle—being able to get funding because the benefits are so societal and qualitative instead of quantitative?
R: I’m not sure if it is that simple because we have not applied for specific funding for this program for a while now. So until we apply and we are rejected, I’m not sure that I would bite into that analysis. It’s just that our priorities have changed as we have grown from 2007. The priorities and the focus of our work has changed based on the type of people that we have in our staff, and based on the grant writer that we had. I think that there is the very possibility that we will return to writing grants that will look into that particular program and will make it into a more robust program.
A: For policies that you have seen make a change in the community, do you know about how big the time span is? Like how long it usually takes in order to see a policy affect the community?
R: I think that policy change takes quite a long time, but it depends on the people in charge and the level of opposition. You know, generally, people are not opposed to good food options for people. There is no organized opposition for that. You know, we’re not threatening anybody’s job for that in this. So there is no lobbying that tends to provide a barrier. On the other hand, the work that we have been doing in criminal justice, is extremely ill because it does threaten the economic vitality of prisons and police departments. You know, the less crime there is, the less need we have for police officers and prison guards. Those unions are extremely powerful, so when it comes to any type of legislation, that in any way threatens the livelihood of police officers or prison guards, they come out fighting hard. So, these kinds of reforms in the criminal justice arena, take a very long time to execute.
D: Is federal backing, is that kind of what coalitions generally dream of? Is that type of backing—the help from someone that is more powerful than these powerful police unions—desirable? How often does that happen?
R: Well, the only type of federal funding is coming from the department of justice, and they do provide a lot of funding. But most of their activity is research-based. They do a lot of research in how to do better DNA testing, and you know…they are very scientifically oriented and research-based. There is some general funding, but most of it goes through police departments. It doesn’t go to community-based organizations.
D: I’m sorry, for this question I was asking mostly about the Rider’s case…
R: That’s not federal…I’m not sure what you are asking right now.
D: I’m just wondering how often…You mentioned that you used the Rider’s case to get federal backing to get public policy implemented, and I’m wondering how often does that happen that you are able to leverage such support?
R: There have been other cities that have been under similar types of oversight as a result of major police misconduct cases. In many of those cases—you can do research on them. LA is a good example after the Rodney King incident. New York hired an inspector general to check the police commissioner to make sure that the community’s interests were represented. Many, many cities have benefitted from a stronger oversight as a result of having had this federal oversight. So there is precedent for what we are taking, but, as you know, every situation has its own set of variables—different judges, different cities, different mayors. It’s somewhat different in each incident, but we are hopeful. We are optimistic, and we are doing the best we can to extract the maximum benefit for the community from this situation.
A: How do you get supporters if you want to make policies and you don’t know how to ask for support? Or if you want fellow peers to support you, how do you go about doing that?
R: Well, I think that it’s pretty obvious in the community who is doing what. There are people that are prominent, one way or another. People that come to city council meetings, people that have organizations that deal with similar kinds of things. Groups like the National Lawyer’s Guild, the ECLU, Ella Baker Center are the obvious ones to go to. And then there are other individuals in the city that have worked in the arena of public safety one way or another. Many that are sympathetic to what we are trying to accomplish, and so, basically doing research and doing outreach and knowing who is who in the community and knowing who is receptive and who isn’t.
D: Okay. I think that is all the questions that we have right now for this interview. Unless you want to mention anything else that you think would be beneficial to making change in the community.
R: I think that the questions were very well considered, and I hope I answered them to your satisfaction. If you have any other questions, the easiest way will be to have Ana email them to me.
D: Okay, great. well, thank you so much for taking some time to speak with us. We really appreciate it.
A: Thank you!
R: You’re welcome. Take care!
A: I’ll make a transcript of this and email it to you, so you can look over it and edit whatever you would like.
R: You don’t need to do that. I am fine with it. Save yourselves the extra step.
A: Okay, thank you so much!
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