Our Community                                  

Mandela MarketPlace is based in West Oakland, and primarily serves that dynamic community.  We do, however, reach into areas of East Oakland with our Burbank Garden, Healthy Neighborhood Stores Alliance and Senior Market Booth programs. 

West Oakland is a diverse, and complex community with tremendous potential to footprint a locally sustainable, culturally rich destination.  It is a community with environmental justice and food security challenges that target West Oakland for development investment, activism, and political awareness.  This is a critical time.  West Oakland is changing due to this investment.  One of our major goals is to create opportunity for existing and long-time residents to culturally, economically and socially benefit from the changes happening in their community and neighborhoods.

Some of the challenges that its approximately 25,000 residents face include: 

Poverty:  It is one of the poorest neighborhoods in the Bay Area. 41% percent of West Oakland's households earn less than $15,000 a year, another 14% earn between $15,000 and $25,000 a year, and in its poorest census tract, half of all households earn less than $11, 339 a year. Almost forty percent of its households have no car.

Lack of access to basic needs:  Retail in the community is sparse at best, and residents are forced to supply their basic needs outside of the community, or from area liquor/convenience markets. Neighborhood or convenience markets are an integral part of inner-city life. In a community like West Oakland, almost half of the community relies on walking and public transportation. To access a full service grocery store, it may take up to 2 hours of travel because there are no direct transit routes to the stores located nearest to West Oakland. Thus, neighborhood markets are the primary source of food for many of the families in the community. As of 2005, there were 350 stores licensed to sell liquor in Oakland for a population of 400,000 residents – or one store for every 1,150 people. Most of the stores are clustered in the city's poorest neighborhoods. In West Oakland, there is one liquor store for every 300 residents and two liquor stores for every one food/eating outlet.

Pollution:  The background level of lead contamination for West Oakland is 1200 ppm, that is twice the safety limit set by Environmental Protection Agency.  "West Oakland residents breathe air with 3 times more diesel particles in it than the Bay Area in general.  Air piollution exposure of this magnitude translates to a 2.5 greater lifetime risk of cancer compared to that in the Bay Area.  The rate of emergency department visits for asthma in West Oakland is two to three times that in Alameda County." (Life and Death from Unnatural Causes: Alameda County Public Health Department)