“Community Vision is an indispensable partner in realizing Safe Passages’ dream of creating a Wellness Center in downtown Oakland with the capacity to serve our diverse families. Their strategic capital project planning and lending support positioned Safe Passages to purchase over 16,000 square feet of commercial property to provide critical services to Oakland’s children, youth, and families.” — Josefina Alvarado Mena, Esq., CEO, Safe Passages
Headquartered in downtown Oakland, Safe Passages is dedicated to disrupting cycles of poverty in East Bay communities. Founded as a part of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Urban Health Initiative in 1995, the nonprofit has evolved into a comprehensive service provider for primarily communities of color and immigrant families.
Safe Passages believes in nurturing the well-being of young people to empower them for success, rejecting the notion that access to educational opportunity, health services, and family support should be determined by race or socioeconomic status.
The organization provides a range of services to over 5,200 children, youth, and families annually. Their programs cover early childhood development, academic supports and youth development, juvenile justice, family stabilization, public health, behavioral health, workforce development, policy advocacy, and systems transformation.
For nearly 30 years, Safe Passages has worked with public and private partners to leverage resources that strengthen the safety net for low-income families, reduce youth violence, and level the playing field for students, families, and communities in Alameda County.
With a long history of partnership with Oakland Unified School District, Emery Unified School District, and the Alameda County Office of Education, Safe Passages provides after-school programs such as academic tutoring, sports programs, social emotional learning, and other enrichment services for K-12 students. They also recruit dozens of AmeriCorps members to work in Alameda County schools each year, serving more than 2,000 students annually.
In addition to their student success initiatives, Safe Passages takes a holistic approach to supporting families through programs such as rental assistance, nutrition classes, case management, and career coaching.
Throughout 2019 and 2020, Safe Passages worked with Community Vision’s real estate consultants to explore options for purchasing a building to further support their programs. Our consultants helped the organization identify their core needs in a space, evaluate how much debt they could take, and explore different lending options and ownership models.
After successfully purchasing their 9,360-square-foot headquarters in Old Oakland in late 2021, they had the opportunity to purchase the adjoining property. This past year, Community Vision provided a $2 million acquisition loan to support the purchase of 1015 Clay Street, a 7,140-square-foot building.
Safe Passages plans on expanding its early childhood and parenting programming and mental health wellness offerings to this building. Additionally, they will establish a Community Wellness and Prevention Center, serving as a hub for innovative mental and behavioral health services and providing early intervention and prevention programs for youth and families. This expansion not only enhances Safe Passages’ capacity but also deepens their community engagement, providing ample room for discussion sessions, group gatherings, and events.
This new space will serve an additional 4,000 children, youth, and families annually through a culturally and linguistically appropriate approach to community well-being that fosters resilience and empowerment in the East Bay.
With a strong emphasis on collaboration, the convening’s activities ranged from workshops and participant share-outs to networking sessions and site tours. Through these opportunities for peer mentoring and mutual learning, participant organizations shared their wins, challenges and knowledge gained through their various projects and areas of focus—from tiny home clusters in Fresno to preliminary work around environmental resilience concepts in Los Angeles.