Oakland’s Life Is Living Festival Offers Music, Free Breakfast and Healing

The Oakland-based People’s Kitchen Collective wants to spread a concept they call “radical hospitality,” which asks people to imagine new ways of taking care of one another and living reciprocally with the land. One way they’re fostering this concept is the Life Is Living Festival, which arrives at West Oakland’s DeFremery Park (a.k.a. Lil Bobby Hutton Park) on Saturday, Oct. 11.

Now in its 18th year, the free community event fills the park with family-friendly activities, performances and a free breakfast program inspired by the Black Panthers. As a show of solidarity with oppressed people worldwide, this year’s menu will feature cuisines from Palestine, Haiti and Congo.

Hosting the main stage is RyanNicole, a rapper and poet who co-wrote and co-starred in the recent hip-hop musical Co-Founders at American Conservatory Theater. Performers include Lovey, an up-and-coming rapper with a soulful voice and out-there imagination (Lovey recently competed in a Bay Area music showcase produced by KQED and LaRussell’s Good Compenny collective). AudioPharmacy, a band blending hip-hop and Indigenous rhythms, and powerhouse vocalist Jenn Johns are also on the bill, along with the West Oakland Middle School band, indie rock band Lil Shlurp Shlurp and experimental duo Twisted Universe.

The nonmusical activities at Life Is Living include wellness offerings from Freedom Community Clinic, an Oakland collective that offers free services like herbal medicine, reiki, massage and acupuncture. There’ll be a “wheels zone” for the skaters and cyclists; activities for kids; a community arts zone; an artist vendor marketplace; a Black Panther Party zone and historical exhibits on Oakland’s activist history.

The event’s location at DeFremery Park is no coincidence; many in the community know it as Lil Bobby Hutton Park, named for the teenage Black Panther Party member who was killed by police in 1968. For People’s Kitchen Collective and Life Is Living co-producers Joan Osato and YaVette Holt, the Black Panther Party’s survival programs are a guiding light as they use art and culture to get neighbors together, strengthen relationships and inspire a culture of collective care.

Life Is Living takes place on Saturday, Oct. 11, from 11 a.m.–4 p.m. at DeFremery/Lil Bobby Hutton Park in Oakland.