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For Rev. Andre Shumake Sr., head of a faith-based community alliance in the East Bay’s most troubled city, Richmond’s Green Party mayor has proved a strong ally. 

“Thank God we have someone who’s listening,” said the man who heads the Richmond Improvement Alliance (RIA). 

“The work they do on a case-by-case basis is very good,” said Mayor Gayle McLaughlin. 

While Shumake says the addition of California Highway Patrol officers and cars to city streets may be a temporary necessity in the wake of the unprecedented violence that has wracked the city in recent months, more police aren’t the long-term solution. 

“We need jobs,” he said. 

The RIA is tackling the problem on multiple fronts: job training programs for men and women who have gone through the criminal justice system, sponsorship of a residential housing project for former inmates, training programs in restaurant, barber and beautician skills and a new affordable senior housing complex. 

But Shumake said one additional measure could provide a needed incentive: a formal city policy requiring incentives for hiring local contractors who hire locally. 

One major accomplishment of Shumake’s efforts is the new Macdonald Place Senior Housing complex now rising across from Nevin Park on Macdonald Avenue between Third and Fifth streets in the heart of the city’s troubled Iron Triangle neighborhood. 

The project is a joint effort of the Richmond Redevelopment Agency, Richmond Labor and Love Community Development Corporation (RLL) and The Related Companies of California. 

Rev. Raymond Landry, executive director of the community development corporation and a Richmond native, said he wouldn’t have conceived of the project without Shumake’s constant prodding. 

“One thing I really appreciate about the Richmond Improvement Association and its work is that it’s never been about the RIA,” Landry said. “It has been about getting the resources to do social services, about getting young men out of the prison system and into the community and doing something about violence in the youth community.” 

As well as being an ordained minister, Landry holds a bachelor’s degree in planning and a master’s in social work. 

For Landry, an associate minister at the Independent Holiness Church on 16th Street, the key moment came when he and his spouse were getting ready to head to Lake Tahoe and a celebration of her birthday. 

“Rev. Shumake called me and said he had two tickets to a housing conference in L.A.” he said. After a family discussion, “I flew down. And it was at that conference where I met our partner, The Related Companies. And had it not been for the resources coming through the RIA, this wouldn’t be happening.” 

Landry said his pastor assigned him to work with Shumake, who—with funding from the San Francisco Foundation—had arranged trips for Richmond clergy to visit faith-based community programs around the country. 

“We met with community members, politicians, service providers and pastors to see what we could do to bring about changes in the community,” he said. “After the trips with Rev. Shumake, I realized we had the opportunity to do something unprecedented here in Richmond. With the help of $4.7 million from the redevelopment agency, and an $8 million construction loan from Union Bank, groundbreaking was held last Dec. 11.” 

One of the RIA proposals the mayor particularly likes is its plan to bring together the seniors at Macdonald Place with the youth who frequent Nevin Park.  

“There’s a lot of enthusiasm for that,” she said. “It’s a way of bringing together the generations and for connecting with the park,” which is now being restored by the city. 

Jobs, training 

Landry spoke as he stood on the freshly poured foundation of Macdonald Place, with Larry Fleming smiling nearby. 

Fleming is the director of the RIA’s Employment Re-Entry Program which operates out of the RIA offices at 432 Barrett Avenue, a short walk from the housing site. 

The Good for the Soul Cafe, to be located at the western end of the complex, will offer good food for seniors and neighbors and training for men and women from Fleming’s program. Next door to the east, the barber and beautician center will offer hair care and on-the-job training in both care and sales. 

One of the city’s greatest needs, Fleming said, is construction jobs. 

“Contractors will hire their own, and there is a real need for black contractors here,” he said. “We think that the city should insist on 50 percent local hires, too, though we’re only asking for 30 percent. Otherwise, contractors will keep doing what they’ve been doing. But if there were more contractors of color, they would hire their own people. In this climate, that stuff has got to change.” 

Response from local companies has been good, he said, but “most people will hire the cream of the crop,” workers with clean records. 

“But what about this brother who has come out of the system, a guy with three kids who’s an ex-con but who’s been doing fine and who’s got a union card? If he can’t get a job, he gets drawn back to the violence.” 

Fleming said he understands the frustrations of the young men he meets on the neighborhood streets. “Years ago, that was me,” he said. “This thing,” the violence, “is not going to go away by itself. It’s been bad for 30 years. This city used to be known for its sports. Now it gets all its headlines for so many killed in so many months. But we have to get away from the focus of just reporting on crime.” 

His task, he admits, is formidable.  

“I talked to a young guy on the street, about 19-years-old, and I asked him if he’d registered for the draft, because if he doesn’t he can’t get a federal job. When he said no, I told him he have to register by 24 or he’d be in real trouble. He told me, ‘I’ll be dead by then.’” 

“That’s why the key to our work here is economic development,” said Shumake.  

“A lot of it goes back to the education our young people are getting,” said Landry. “The schools here in West Contra Costa County are some of the worst in California.” 

With the senior housing complex rising nearby, Landry took a reporter to another site, the next target of his development plans. 

With the support of the RIA, he is working to raise the funds to buy the Fourth Street buildings owned by the now closed Temple of Faith. 

In addition to the former church building, itself a converted business, the property includes three dwellings which would house seven or eight former prisoners coming out of the system, who would live there while they learn new job skills. 

Landry said he has been working with Richmond Works, a program that offers real work experience. One of the first jobs of trainees would be the rehabilitation of the buildings, he said. 

Shumake was born of parents who came to Richmond from Louisiana, and his work with the RIA dates back almost a decade. An ordained Baptist minister, he served as coordinator of the North Richmond Missionary Baptist Church’s North Richmond Community Career Resource Center. 

He modeled the RIA on the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Montgomery Improvement Association. 

He has marshaled an impressive coalition of local clergy, and organized the city’s 2005 Black-on-Black Crime Summit following an earlier rash of slayings that included the murder of De La Salle High School football star Terrance Kelly, gunned down two days before he was to leave for the University of Oregon on a full-ride scholarship. 

Friday morning he called a reporter to ask “What can we do about these guns? We have to do something.” 

Shumake had found yet another way to engage in his community in the struggle against violence. 

“The RIA and other groups like it are offering the community a different vision of what we can become,” Mayor McLaughlin said.