Oakland Forward is a social justice nonprofit that works to remove barriers to power for Black and brown people in Oakland County, focusing on the family institution as a way to do that. We started as the Pontiac Policy Council (P2C) nearly seven years ago. I was a community organizer, and my co-founders, Autumn Butler and Tameka Ramsey, were in social work. While passing out food boxes at a local elementary school, we realized we’d always be feeding families if we didn’t get to the root causes of the problems in our community. We wanted to focus on policies that really disenfranchise the people of Pontiac.
