Our History
Care 4 Community Action grew out of the power and relationships built through Carroll Fife’s campaign for Oakland City Council in 2020.
After winning the District 3 Council seat in 2020, key organizers and volunteers continued organizing as Care 4 Community, a 501c3, to build popular support for a People’s Agenda on which Councilmember Fife ran her campaign: to make housing a human right, to invest in alternatives for real community safety, to tax corporate wealth to improve City services, and to win climate and environmental justice for all.
After two years of weekly canvasses and face-to-face conversations with neighbors in Oakland’s District 3, we continued to see that Oakland residents’ needs were not being met. While Councilmember Fife achieved legislative victories, her advocacy around key issues like housing and homelessness was met with resistance by the City Administration at the time. This experience made clear the need for a vehicle that could be used to explicitly build political power in service of our People’s Agenda: a 501c4.
We created Care 4 Community Action in order to build political power during the 2022 election cycle and lead the field campaign for Measures Q, U and V.
In an overwhelming victory that marks a turning point after 70 years of racist housing policy in California, 80% of Oaklanders voted YES on Measure Q, authorizing the City to build 13,000 units of deeply affordable, publicly subsidized housing for low-income residents.
Measure U, which passed by a whopping 76% of the vote, will invest $350 million to fund the development of this housing.
Measure V, the 3rd ballot measure that Care 4 Community Action organized voters to support, passed with 68% of Oakland residents agreeing to the expansion of Just Cause eviction protections for tens of thousands more Oakland households, stabilizing the housing market and protecting students and educators from being evicted during the school year.
As Care 4 Community Action continues to door knock on a weekly basis, we are confronted with the enormity of the task at hand. While the landslide victory of Measure Q clearly demonstrated widespread voter support for the development of deeply affordable social housing across the City, this development might take years to come to fruition. In the meantime, Oakland residents continue to suffer from a housing affordability and homelessness crisis that is dangerous and demoralizing for everyone.
We need the sustained engagement of Oakland residents to elect officials and pass policies that culminate in systemic change.
