The Mission of Oakland & the World Enterprises (OAW), a nonprofit organization, is to launch and sustain for-profit businesses for cooperative ownership by formerly incarcerated and other people facing extreme barriers to economic survival. OAW was founded in 2014 by Elaine Brown, a former leader of the Black Panther Party. Since its founding, OAW has launched two businesses, and, secured a 3/4 acre plot of land at 7th & Campbell Streets in West Oakland, on which to construct a 79-unit 100% affordable housing complex for people with very low and extremely low incomes. OAW will launch four new businesses on the ground floor of that 7th & Campbell complex, including a neighborhood market, a fitness center, a tech center and a restaurant. At our ceremonial groundbreaking in April 2022, we named our new housing complex The Black Panther.

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Seventh Street was once called the Harlem of the West, where Black business and cultural life thrived, resounding in the sounds of Billie Holiday and B. B. King and Al Green, who might play at Slim Jenkins Supper Club or Esther's Orbit Room, owned by the beautiful Esther Mabry. Seventh Street was where there had been a Black bank and pharmacy and movie theater—the Lincoln Theatre—most in the very same block as our new development.