Robin L. Love, director of the Prescott Family Resource Center leads a meeting to organize a youth conference on April 18.

Robin Love is speaking

with all the zest of a revival

preacher.

"What we're trying to build is a neighborhood where people feel safe and have something to do. Just like building a house, we're trying to build a neighborhood," she says. "Your participation is crucial for us to start planning what we're going to do."

More than 30 Oakland community leaders and children nod back in agreement. They are packed into a small meeting room at the Prescott Family Resource Center in West Oakland to brainstorm ideas for an upcoming conference for West Oakland youth. Love scribbles their ideas furiously in purple and red magic marker on a large sheet of white paper clipped to an easel.

Love, 31, is the director of the center at 800 Pine Street in West Oakland. It was established one year ago by an Alameda County children's agency to provide assistance to low-income families in West Oakland's Prescott neighborhood, where more than 75 percent of the residents live below the poverty line, according to 1990 United States Census data.

Carlos Windham, a West African music and hip-hop musician, teaches an afterschool art class at the Prescott Center.

African tribal masks made by students in the art class.

The center also offers after-school activities for children. Gwenifer Engram, who has been coming to the center since it opened, sends five of her children to the after-school art program, which meets twice a week.

"It's helped my children because they're not stuck in the house all day," said Engram, 44. Magic marker self-portraits, African tribal masks made of brown paper bags and a Chinese new year dragon made from paper plates and streamers -- all products of the art class -- decorate the center's walls.

But the center does not focus only on programs for youth.

“It has become a center for community organizing that wasn't happening right in that neighborhood before, and it has brought resources to a community that was really in need."

Nancy Nadel
Oakland City Councilmember

Marvin Martin records his visit to the clothing closet to get a suit to wear to church.

A client uses the Prescott Center's drop-in business center to send a fax. Clients can also use computers, a copy machine and a phone free of charge.

The Prescott Family
Resource Center
800 Pine Street - 2nd Floor
Oakland, CA 94607
(510) 628-9152

Hours
Monday 10-3
Tuesday 11:30-5
Wednesday 11-4
Thursday 9-5
Friday 10-2

“I also came here to get a little food because I'm unemployed and need a little assistance,” Martin said. “I have lettuce and bread that I'm taking home to my family.”

The center runs a food store that sells bread, canned vegetables and other dry goods at less than cost to members of the community. Love said that West Oakland residents have been trying to get a permanent local grocery store for years, but none have stayed for long. "We don't have those types of retail services that are important when you look at a thriving community. Everything is outside of this area," said Love.

Martin also uses the center to help with his job search. The center allows free, drop-in use of three new computers, a fax machine, a copier, a phone and other office equipment. Martin typed his resume on a computer and called potential employers from the center's phone. When Martin recently got an interview for a security guard position with Oakland public schools, the center gave him bus fare from its “emergency fund” because he had no transportation.

The center's six sunny rooms on the building's second floor also house a “parent drop-in room” with comfortable brown couches, a television and a kitchenette where Love says, "folks can just go and chill."

The center operates on $200,000 a year from the federal government, community foundations and donations and serves a largely African American community, although Love says that the numbers of Hispanic and Asian clients are growing.

The hardest part is getting people to come in. The center's four staff members go door to door and send mass mailings in West Oakland to try to get people involved.

"We can provide all the services we want and we can offer them all we want, but it's trying to get people into the mindset that they need it. I think that's the biggest obstacle," said Hana McQuinn, a project assistant at the center.

In the last six months, center statistics show that 335 people used the clothing closet and 195 have used the business center.

There are also Alameda County case workers who work at the center for two days each week. They help to connect clients with the health and social services that they need. In the last six months, they have recorded 55 drop-in visitors.

"More and more people are coming around because they're getting our letters in the mail. So more clients are coming in and saying they want me to write letters to their social worker saying that they're participating in the GED program or they're getting job training from me on the phones," said McQuinn, 31.

Love, who grew up in West Oakland, has been working to improve her neighborhood for as long as she can remember. Her grandmother, Lillian Q. Love, and her great-grandmother, Martel Meneweather, helped to establish parks, refurbish old Victorian homes, and secure underground utilities for Oak Center, another neighborhood in West Oakland.

"I remember very young being taken to (neighborhood association) meetings," said Love. "I always say that my ancestors and my grandma are driving me. My motivation is really beyond doing this for just (Alameda County), but really understanding that over 20 years, you can change a community."