While many affluent neighborhoods of Oakland, CA are draped with lush, tree-lined streets, many lower-income areas are left barren. When Kemba Shakur, now 46, and her five children moved to a treeless block in city in 1994, she noticed this immediately and set about to change it.
Trees are deeply rooted in Shakur’s life and have always provided her with inspiration and solace. As a young girl, Shakur’s mother and father whisked her away on trips to lie under the canopies of California’s giant sequoias and coastal redwoods. Even while living amidst the concrete and cable car lines of San Francisco, she recalls marveling at the delicate plum tree blossoms that flooded some of the city’s neighborhoods each spring. It was only natural for Shakur to want her children to have the same opportunities.
Though trees were noticeably absent from Shakur’s new Oakland neighborhood, what was noticeably present—and equally problematic—to Shakur were the scores of young men and women whom Shakur describes as the city’s “idle youth” – teenagers who spend their days loitering on street corners, getting involved with gangs, or dealing drugs. A stint as a corrections officer at Soledad State Prison gave Shakur a glimpse into the future for many of these at-risk youth and sparked her interest in helping them escape the cycle of crime and incarceration.
“I see a cycle with un-education or mis-education, and with that comes taking risks, and with those come prison and deaths,” says Shakur. “I know that if we create more opportunities, there will be less crime and a lower murder rate. I’m 100-percent positive.”
Shakur’s passion for greenery and desire to help educate her neighborhood’s youth took her to San Francisco’s Bay View-Hunter’s Point District, one of the city’s many neighborhoods she called home as child. There, Mohammad Nuru is working to re-characterize the district’s gritty reputation through his organization, the San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners (SLUG), an urban-gardening, economic-development, and job-placement trifecta.
“I saw how he engaged people to clean up and beautify their community and get jobs, and I wanted to do that on my block,” she says. But Shakur wanted to do more than plant a garden.
In 1998, she founded Urban Releaf, a non-profit organization that melds community engagement, youth outreach job training, and urban beautification into one. Urban Releaf has planted over 14,000 trees in lower-income areas of Oakland and neighboring Richmond and trained more than 4,000 youth in tree planting and maintenance projects.
By the way Shakur describes the volunteers – armed with shovels, tree saplings, and good intentions – it’s clear that the most important things she nurtures aren’t trees, but those who plant them.
Rukeya Harris, a West Oakland native and former Welfare-to-Work recipient who Shakur mentored, returned from college to intern for Urban Releaf.
“We’ve invested in her, and she has come to invest in us,” Shakur beams. “It’s just a win-win to invest in people – not just young people. It’s people.”
“I’m not trying to save the world,” she says. “But young people need that investment—and we as a society can do more.”
