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When we launched The Oakland REACH five years ago, I never imagined this is the note I would send to mark our 5th Anniversary: MacKenzie Scott is investing $3,000,000 in The REACH so we can take our work to the next level! 

MacKenzie Scott’s investment is our largest gift to date and allows us to set even more ambitious goals. Think you’ve seen us be big and bold? Just wait! We are so grateful for this gift and inspired by the trust Ms. Scott is placing in The REACH, a Black-led, parent-run organization, to do the work that will best meet the needs and aspirations of our communities.

We also want to acknowledge the tremendous number of generous funders and individual donors who have believed and invested in us since 2015. The work you supported us to build — from passing The Opportunity Ticket to creating our Literacy for All campaign to launching the Hub — brought us to this amazing milestone.

From our start, The REACH has understood the untapped power and potential of Black and Brown families to advocate for and create solutions to the educational crisis facing their kids. Over the past five years, we’ve built a new parent power playbook that we believe will truly liberate families. Ms. Scott’s high-impact investment gives REACH the opportunity to do even more and emboldens our vision to double down on parent power as the solution.

As we face an uncertain future together, we are poised to lead fearlessly into our next chapter. There’s no shortage of hard work ahead: last month, we saw new data at our local Board meeting showing that only 8.7% of Oakland Unified School District eighth-graders scored proficient in math this fall. Contrast this with our December parent survey, which showed a HUGE demand for math skills — 81% of parents saying they want more high-dosage math tutoring. Parents want their kids to read and do math…well!

When we called out the same crisis in literacy, we responded by launching our Literacy for All campaign and then creating our Literacy Liberation Center. And our children’s reading proficiency increased — and continues to improve. Now we’ve got to do it again — this time in math.

This investment will support us to light the grid of a parent-powered infrastructure — not just in Oakland but in other communities across the country.

Here’s to the next 5 years!