The Oak Knoll Coalition consists of neighborhood volunteers who take an active role in shaping the future of Oakland.

Many of us are already active in our homeowner associations, organize events for Earth Day or Creek-to-Bay Day Cleanups, participate in the neighborhood policing activities, remove graffiti, or are volunteers in the Keep Oakland Beautiful Campaign.

But, with a project as complex and difficult as the Oak Knoll site, we also need your help. To have a favorable impact, we need not only to impress our local city councilperson, now Larry Reid, with our political voice, but we also need to get the message across to the entire city council and to county representatives.

Indeed, we need to make the Oak Knoll base redevelopment a part of the collective consciousness of the entire city. We are now on the threshold of designing one of the last large hillside parcels in all of Oakland, and the results will have a great impact on the health of the region.

In the past, we have expected city support for local needs. But this time the city has taken a passive rather than active position. If neighbors are able to successfully revitalize Club Knoll with a local library, senior center, and public meeting space, and bring about wonderful opportunities for active recreation, open space, creek restoration, we need to ask the city to become a partner to ensure that these gifts are kept in perpetuity for open and healthy access by the public.

Elsewhere on this website, we have outlined the goals and dreams that neighbors have expressed for the Oak Knoll base over the past decade. Nowhere have we insisted that the entire site be devoted to public benefit, but always have we insisted that some portion of the site be given over to the greater good.

And, it is now—when we have an active ongoing conversation with the well-known community designer Peter Calthorpe and community developer SunCal Companies—that we need most to express our own optimism about the future.

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