Harm Repair at Scale: Transportation Infrastructure and Equitable Development Projects

Randolph Belle is the founder of the nonprofit SOA Village Housing DBA EVOAK, which supports the advancement of creative placemaking; he’s the co-founder and partner of Creative Development Partners (CDP), a creative community development firm; and founder of RBA Creative (RBA), a business development center for the arts. He brings over 30 years of experience in Oakland and San Francisco as an artist and social impact leader. His work spans public, private, and civic initiatives, emphasizing responsible economic and community development by leveraging innovation as a tool. His approach, championed by CDP, centers on "community benefit by design," which utilizes market-based frameworks to address community-based challenges.

Randolph's current work includes facilitating multiple harm repair initiatives tied to transportation infrastructure projects that displaced Black families in redlined neighborhoods through urban renewal and eminent domain, including Equitable Black Berkeley, an initiative supporting the legacy Black residents of South Berkeley, and Vision 980, a CalTrans project to study the removal of the I-980 freeway and reclamation.

He also facilitates the groundbreaking multi-agency environmental justice initiative and supports the development of a 2.5-acre eco-industrial artisan park, both in West Oakland.

Randolph is a founding organizational member of the Black Cultural Zone in East Oakland and leads a multi-year Wallace Foundation-funded research initiative to study Black culture in East Oakland’s as a tool for community development.

Brandi Howard is the president and CEO of East Bay Community Foundation (EBCF). Howard is a collaborative and compassionate leader who brings deep experience as an equity and justice strategist rooted in community to the Foundation’s vision and framework for A Just East Bay.

Before EBCF, Howard led strategic planning and the development of the equity learning infrastructure as chief of staff and interim vice president of programs at San Francisco Foundation. Her leadership was critical in advancing the equity-centered grantmaking policy and systems change in the region. When she began there, she worked with the The Daniel E. Koshland Civic Unity Program, a community leadership program that works with grassroots risk- takers and makes a five-year investment in their community. Prior to that, Howard worked for the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene where she oversaw two city-wide initiatives to reduce infant mortality and chronic disease and led the development of a division-wide framework to streamline implementation, staffing, and quality improvement processes for Neighborhood Health Action Centers.

Howard is a third-generation Oaklander who grew up in multicultural communities throughout the city, in a family with a heritage of Pan-Africanism and a global worldview. Conscious of the complexities of race, racism, and racial injustice, Howard began her career recognizing the linkage of all oppressions in the shared fight for liberation. She was drawn to advocacy and health equity work during her nineteen years as a doula working with Black and Latinx women. Decades-stagnant health outcomes for Black and Latinx mothers led her to speak out for systems change and her career shifted. As maternal child health subcommittee chair for the Alameda County Public Health Commission, she served as a liaison between public and nonprofit agencies, community members and the county board of supervisors to provide recommendations to support optimal maternal and child health in Alameda County. Howard also worked for First 5 Alameda County, and has advised a number of nonprofit organizations on strategy, sustainability, and equity as a consultant.

Howard is a member of Chief, a network of senior women leaders built to strengthen their leadership journey, cross-pollinate ideas across industries, and affect change from the top- down. Howard is a lecturer for equity in practice at the School of Social Welfare at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is also an advisory committee member. Howard is principal consultant at Beyond the Curve, a consulting firm providing organizational development, business strategy, and talent and crisis management.

Howard started her career transition journey at Merritt College after ten years in the workforce as a mother of three children. She transferred to the University of California, Berkeley where she earned a Bachelor of Arts in African American Studies and a Master of Social Work. Now a mother of four, Howard is constantly inspired by her children’s creativity and relentless energy. Her children are her motivation to advance racial equity, and transform political, social, and economic outcomes for all who call the East Bay home.

Wilhelmenia “Mina” Wilson is Executive Director at Healthy Black Families, Inc., a non-profit community based public health organization based in Berkeley, CA. Healthy Black Families, Inc. organizes individuals, families, and the organizations that serve them, into collaborative communities empowered with skills to advance social equity and justice, with a focus on Black people, families and communities. Mina’s ancestry connects her to Somerset Place, a historic North Carolina plantation where five generations of her ancestors were exploited as enslaved people. Mina holds BA degree in Business Administration from Georgia State University and a MA in 21st Century Leadership from St. Mary’s College of California. She lives in Northern California and is the proud mother of two adult children. Comments restricted to single page.