Thursday evening a standing-room-only audience at St. Columba Catholic Church, drawn largely from Oakland’s Christian, Muslim and Jewish communities of faith, heard lively and moving testimony from pastoral leaders, community members, officials and representatives from U.S. cities with successful violence-reduction programs.

Andrew Peters of the Oakland Community Organization, which organized the March 18 event, pointed out that the 14 crosses at the St. Columba entry mark this year’s 14 homicides in Oakland.

When Make Oakland Better Now launched in late June 2009, they sounded like any other brand-new local do-gooder organization. They called meetings to discuss their issues. They sought to gain a constituency. They launched a web site and put out a call for a community meeting a few months hence. All good stuff, but nothing extraordinary.


But then, all of a sudden, the activity level of the group’s leaders ramped up.


So who are these folks, what are they about, and what do they want to accomplish?

Watch our video interview with the group's founders, where they discuss their concerns about public safety and other key challenges Oakland faces...