The Berkeley Outreach Coalition is comprised of several individuals and organizations, each with their own missions.
East Bay Community Law Center
Our mission is to promote justice and build a community that is more secure, productive, healthy, and hopeful by providing legal services and policy advocacy that are responsive to the needs of low-income communities, and law training that prepares future attorneys to be skilled and principled advocates who are committed to addressing the causes and conditions of racial and economic injustice and poverty.
Homeless Action Center
People who are homeless are overwhelmingly poor, disabled, ill and marginalized. The Homeless Action Center (HAC) provides no-cost, barrier-free, culturally sensitive legal representation that makes it possible for homeless men and women to access the maze of social safety net programs that provide a pathway out of homelessness. Through HAC’s legal assistance, clients obtain health care, housing, a sustainable income and restored dignity. HAC is the only program in the Bay Area that specializes in legal assistance to those who are chronically homeless.
Consider the Homeless!
CONSIDER THE HOMELESS! is a small yet dedicated group of neighbors and friends who seek to alleviate the suffering of Berkeley’s homeless, our brothers and sisters who are living and sleeping on the streets of our fair city. Every Thursday and Sunday we cook and serve over 8 gallons of hot, home-made from scratch, nutritious soup, enough for over 100 people. We start serving right before the sun is setting, when most folks are settling in to where they will be spending the night. Along with the hot food we also try to keep an abundance of donated basic survival supplies.
Suitcase Clinic
The mission of the Suitcase Clinic is to promote the health and overall well-being of underserved individuals through medical care in partnership with the UCSF Joint Medical Program, service provision, cooperative learning, and collective action among community and professional volunteers, students, and participants. We realize that health is a holistic state of complete physical, mental, emotional and social well-being, not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.
Berkeley Free Clinic
The mission of the Berkeley Free Clinic is to empower individuals and communities by providing accessible, client-centered health services and information. Since the Clinic opened, there has been an ever-present, albeit dynamic, need for its services as social conditions have undergone shifts and changes. It has become something of an icon in the area, and has served thousands in a variety of ways during its 50-year history. Its founding principles and structures, which can be found on their website, survive to this day.
Berkeley Copwatch
Berkeley Copwatch is the original Copwatch group. We began in 1990 on Telegraph Ave. as an all-volunteer organization dedicated to monitoring police actions and non-violently asserting our rights. Since that time, many Copwatch-type organizations have sprung up across the nation, in various forms. Berkeley Copwatch is based on the idea that WATCHING the police is a crucial first step in the process of organizing. We do not attempt to interfere in police activity or to resist police misconduct physically. It is our hope that, one day, mass outrage at police and government violence will increase to a point where fundamental change in the nature of policing becomes inevitable.
Berkeley Needle Exchange Emergency Distribution
Based in Berkeley, California, NEED is unique among syringe services programs because we are a volunteer-based collective. Currently, we operate from a black van with our logo and title written on the side at three neighborhood sites each week. We offer free, anonymous services in a client-centered manner, and we are dedicated to the prevention of infectious diseases and to improving the physical, spiritual, and political health of drug users. We also began an overdose prevention and education component to address the rising number of overdoses among injection drug users.
Community member - Boona Cheema
Served as the Executive Director of Building Opportunities for Self Sufficiency (BOSS) for over 40 years
Masks 2 All
A group established to distribute reusable, washable masks to unhoused individuals in the Bay Area to ensure all members of our community are supported during the COVID-19 crisis. Theirgoal is to protect every unhoused individual in Berkeley, Oakland, and San Francisco by handing out 2 masks to each of the approximately 2,000 unhoused people in Berkeley, along with a flyer with information on how to use the masks.
