Oakland Local

Oakland's daily non-profit news & community web site and neighborhood guide.

Oakland Local is the independent, nonprofit news resource for what’s happening in education, city government, food, innovative tech, arts and culture, youth and more in Oakland. We are journalists, educators, women, people of color and entrepreneurs funded by Google, the Investigative News Network, the California Endowment Foundation, the G.W. Williams Center for Independent Journalism and more.

We are the authentic voices of Oakland. Our contributors live across the city and range in age from 17-75. We publish diverse viewpoints from a range of people drawn together by their passion to reflect the real Oakland and tell the stories that should be told – but are not. We publish community voices and professional reporters and we love youth and beginners as well as OG’s and experienced folks.

We are pro-small and local business. We’re all about shopping locally and helping merchants, artisans and small business people use our site, our classes and programs to connect to the community who will buy from them and keep and bring money and jobs into our city. We celebrate Oakland innovators, workers and business folks because they are us.

We make connections across silos and sectors. Oakland Local has been involved in programs that bring together techies and local residents (Code for Oakland); small business people and social media marketers (Hack the Hood); concerned citizens and subject matter experts (Oakland News Cafe); and people who want to learn new skills (Oakland Local Academy).

We have a big footprint to tell the story of Oakland. OL’s content is distributed across the web via Yahoo! News, KQED, SF Gate, New America Media, The Media Consortium and other partners. Our team speaks at national conferences about building a sustainable – and scrappy – nonprofit business model here in Oakland that is diverse and inclusive. We also train attendees in using media and tech at conferences organized by Netroots Nation, the John and James L. Knight Foundation SF State/Renaissance Journalism Center and others.