Our mission statement is: “To build unity and self-determination through care programs that provide food, cultural nourishment and support to North Oakland & South Berkeley residents.”

OCUEJ has always been about supporting displacement-resilience & cultural survival for low-income North Oakland residents. From the start, our core programming addressed nutritional and other basic needs for our community, but in a cultural & social empowerment context, through events centering artistic, power-building, & educational offerings. Our main service-center at Driver Plaza Park had been a community social center and served as a former Black Panthers program delivery site. Our leadership, implementing staff, and volunteers are as diverse as North Oakland itself, and in the case of our Founder/Director ‘Auntie’ Frances Michelle Moore, go back to the early 1970s and the heyday of the Black Panthers in Oakland.

Auntie Frances founded the ‘Self-Help Hunger Program (SHHP)’ when the real estate bubble of the early 2000s burst and chaos increased in North Oakland’s housing market. The SHHP subsequently co-evolved into OCUEJ, in 2018. Then as now, we supported greater resistence to poverty, ill-health, cultural sabotage & alienation, food-insecurity, and displacement among the low-income Brown People from A/PI, Black, Indigenous, and Latinx cultural groups, who made up the majority in our five neighborhoods primarily served: Santa Fe, Bushrod, Golden Gate, Longfellow, & Temescal. Since then our served constituency has ballooned from close to 250 unduplicated individuals to, since COVID, over 1,500 and growing. We’re proud to call some sixteen other community organizations our partners.