Oakland Doesn’t Need Saving
It was a dark day for the skies and the Oakland sports family, one not necessarily the best for building. But as Oakland fans know, sometimes the best stuff gets built in the toughest spots.
I was back with the B’s Ballunteer program at Emerson Elementary on the middle day of Steph and Ayesha Curry’s Eat.Learn.Play and national nonprofit KABOOM! creating two new playgrounds, student garden and nature area, and sport and soccer courts for the students. The rain started early and did not let up. This was one of those storms that the local news talks about in harried tones for a week to steel our weatherless paradise against its nemesis, the Fast-Moving Atmospheric River. Baseball weather this was not. Volunteers huddled under tents and the closeness made our introductions easier.
There were plenty of Emerson parents, regular volunteers and first-timers, and the professionals: the Kaboom staff and playground experts. But to hear the backstories and Fun Facts™ of everyone here together on this uncooperative day brought me joy. Someone was learning sign language. Another had adopted a new dog, a “super mutt,” but had done all the DNA testing to confirm exactly what kinds of lineage were making him super. Several said they would be out hiking or camping in the rain regardless; for them, the conditions were perfect. One was an amateur chef, and one told the story of naming their kid after an artichoke. The man next to me was proud to say he was a product of Oakland Public Schools his whole life and had lived in the Town continuously for over 70 years. “Well,” said the woman next to him, “I just figured out this morning that I don’t own any rain boots.”
As I often do as a Ballunteer, I make sure that I am being helpful first and foremost by not being unhelpful. I am not “handy” and I do not “regularly listen to the important directions.” I fit firmly into the “measure once, cut dozens of times into dangerous ribbons” camp. IKEA guidebook illustrators are regularly sent to my house to study my brain. What is marvelous about these Ballunteer events, whether it’s food prep or picking up trash or Oakland 68’s Day, is that there’s a place for me and those like me to learn and contribute with our varying confidences and abilities. And all that being said, my mistake #1 today was volunteering for the first option, building planter boxes for a student garden, before hearing the rest—surely there was something more low-stakes and low-skill coming. Mistake #2 was compounding mistake #1 by going right for the power tools. I should be nowhere near a drill bit the length of my arm or an impact driver, which I now know exists and will be the name of my next garage band or multi-level marketing scheme.
And as always happens, quickly and surely we did some good. We built two huge planter boxes while others lay down wood chips and dug holes for plants and equipment. One group built soccer goals. Tomorrow, I was told, there will be 150 volunteers continuing our projects and building new additions to the playgrounds—the playgrounds that were designed with rounds of input from the students themselves. I met kind and cool new people, used a level (that little bubble is so cute!), commiserated and celebrated with other parents of young kids, ate the best gumbo of my life for lunch, told a dozen people to come to their first B’s games next season, and was charmingly distracted from the fact that I was soaked through throughout.
When I got home, I listed to our VP and co-founders discuss in the weekly B’s Biz the frankly absurd story of building the bulk of Raimondi Park in just three months. There were details I knew—the 40-odd city requirements to opening had zero room for error, the 20-hour days for the staff and construction team, the hundred-odd fans joining in and constructing parts of the visiting locker room right up to first pitch—and the angst at the broader narrative we’ve all heard before: if it falls to the community to do it, if the creation is chaotic, if you have no backup plan, then something has already gone terribly wrong. What I hadn’t heard was our co-founder Paul’s quote, “We’re not here to save Oakland; we’re here to prove Oakland never needed saving,” and it struck me perfectly today. Many hands do make light work, but many hands make the work more meaningful too. That there is work to be done in Oakland means most that there is a desire to be better and the energy to help. It might sometimes be in the rain or at the hands of a man who has never impact driven before. But the single best part of the Ballunteer program as a visiting volunteer in all these many generous and talented walks of life is seeing that Oakland doesn’t need saving because there are people who know exactly what they’re doing saving it every day.
