Our Work

On November 18th, 2023, over 100 students showed up (in the rain) to Verdese Carter Park in East Oakland for our second annual “OSS Park” event. Oakland Student Service adopted the park in late 2022 and oversees all upkeep and beautification, in partnership with the City of Oakland. Our leaders and volunteers removed trash and weeds, planted fresh flowers, installed new garden beds, and more!

KitsCubed is a nonprofit organization looking to make STEM accessible to everyone, regardless of social status. OSS partnered with KitsCubed for the second consecutive year to assist in hosting the annual KitsCubed STEM Fair on September 9th, 2023. With over 3,000 in attendance, our leaders and volunteers ran interactive experiment booths, gave out free science kits, and more.

On December 14th, 2022, our leaders and volunteers, in partnership with Target, wrapped and delivered holiday presents to students at our partner school Hoover Elementary, in West Oakland. We were able to give out over 100 presents focusing on creativity, activity, and learning. It is always a great time with the kids at Hoover!

On November 20th, 2022, our leaders and volunteers partnered with nonprofit organization 100 Black Men of the Bay Area, as well as Councilmember Loren Taylor and other community partners for a Thanksgiving Turkey Drive. We set up shop at Arroyo Viejo Park in Deep East Oakland, packing and distributing over 500 Turkeys and over 1000 Thanksgiving meals to those in need.

College admissions aren’t fair, and many students in Oakland public schools don’t have access to equitable application resources. To combat this, we hosted a series of free webinars detailing the application and admission process in whole, with support from the likes of UCSB Director of Admissions Lisa Prezkop, SFSU Director of Financial Aid Jimmie Wilder, and more. Our webinars reached over 1,000 OUSD students live, as well as many more who watched the recordings.

In the height of our partnership with KitsCubed, CEOs Ahmed Muhammed and Matteo Salvadei worked side-by-side to expand on the success of Ahmed’s 2021 STEM Fair. With partnerships and sponsorships from the Golden State Warriors, California Life Sciences, and the Oakland Zoo, among others, we were able to successfully serve over 2,000 students with interactive experiments, free food, and much more on September 17th, 2022. Over 75 dedicated leaders spent the day running the event, resulting in the largest OSS event to date.

After adopting Verdese Carter Park from the City of Oakland, our leaders planned and executed our first fully autonomous event. Over 150 volunteers came to East Oakland to repaint the playground, benches, and tables, revitalized the community garden, removed thousands of pounds of trash, and more.

Our most ambitious event, in partnership with KitsCubed, was the Month of STEM. Throughout August and September, Ahmed, along with OSS leaders (who were also in school at the time), went to every public elementary school in Oakland with interactive, engaging, and hands-on science lessons for the students. We were able to teach over 2,000 students over the course of the month, introducing many to the wonders of science for the first time.

With the food collected from our drive, paired with fresh produce donations from over a dozen local grocery stores, our leaders and volunteers distributed over 5,000 pounds of food to elementary school students at low-income schools in Oakland. We set up three different food pantries throughout the month of May, 2022, at MLK Elementary, Hoover Elementary, and Brookfield Elementary, respectively. We later partnered with St. Columba’s church in North Oakland to distribute more canned goods to the unhoused community.

When we began our food drive in April, 2022, our leadership team spanned four Oakland high schools: Oakland Technical High, Skyline High, Bishop O’Dowd, and Head Royce School. Our leaders within those four schools organized and marketed multi-week food drives, collecting over 4,000 pounds of canned, box, and fresh goods to be donated to low-income students in OUSD.

Dimond Day of Service was the first ever event we planned and executed. Many of our leaders grew up playing at the now run-down Dimond Park, and we wanted to improve it for the next generation of kids. We recruited over 250 volunteers to completely revitalize the park from top to bottom on March 5th, 2022, including a new playground. We partnered with nonprofit organization Neighborhood Garden Initiative to build and plant over a dozen garden beds with fresh crops for the local community to enjoy. We also removed trash, repainted structures, and much more.

On January 17th, 2022, we partnered with nonprofit organization Higher Ground NDC, bringing over 60 volunteers (10 days after our inception) to Edes and 105th in Deep East Oakland to remove over 4,000 pounds of trash in our first ever event as a collective! Eternal gratitude to our consistent partner Higher Ground for believing in us since the beginning.