You’re invited to the Oakland Grown Student Art & Music Festival — a celebration of student art, music, and community supporting Oakland public education on Saturday, Oct. 25, 2025, at the Oakland Museum Garden.
Here’s why you’re invited:
In the summer of 2020, Piedmont raised more than $80,000 for Oakland organizations advancing educational equity. Inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, fellow Piedmont alums and I started a simple fundraiser that blossomed into the city-wide initiative Piedmont for Oakland Public Schools, aka “POPS.” This growth was in part thanks to our fiscal sponsor, the Oakland Public Education Fund, the only nonprofit that fundraises directly for all Oakland public schools.
Five years later, the urgency is back. Public education is facing historic cuts while schools are politicized, and social safety nets for under-resourced communities are slashed. In Oakland, the school district has already lost $9.3 million in federal funding for after-school programs and literacy initiatives.
Some of us may feel we should turn inward during this time of crisis and protect our own community. We pay for our homes, we fund our schools — why dedicate our resources to Oakland?
I believe the answer lies in the story of POPS. Its success transcended mere dollars — it affirmed three powerful truths that apply today:
- When Oakland thrives, Piedmont does too
2. Piedmonters carry a responsibility to stand with our Oakland neighbors
3. When Piedmont activates, we can enact meaningful change
Shared Futures
As Piedmonters, we walk Oakland’s streets, work in its downtown, and see our home values rise and fall with its housing market. We take its public transport, hire its teachers from its schools, and put “Oakland” in our Instagram bios for street cred. Piedmont is part of Oakland, and our futures are inextricably linked.
Education lies at the heart of this bond. It’s more than test scores; it is a determinant of health, a pathway to mobility, and one of the most powerful tools to combat inequality. When Oakland students thrive, the ripple effects reach every corner of the East Bay, including ours.
Our Responsibility
The consequences of the current crisis fall unevenly. For too many Oakland students, chronic underfunding creates lifelong barriers to health, opportunity, and stability — barriers most of us in Piedmont will never face.
Do we have a moral responsibility to act? Absolutely. What’s more, history agrees. Piedmont’s own legacy of redlining and restrictive housing deeds helped create today’s inequities. If our community once reinforced the divide, we also have the obligation to help close it.
Piedmont’s Power
In 2020, POPS didn’t just meet its goal; it nearly quintupled it. Piedmonters poured in with donations, questions, and energy. The Oakland Education Fund later called the campaign “transformative.”
Piedmont’s donations helped fuel the Ed Fund’s Oakland Undivided campaign, which distributed 25,000 laptops and 10,000 hotspots across Oakland during the COVID-19 pandemic, ensuring that 97 percent of its low-income students stayed connected. That is the kind of impact Piedmont helped once, and can again — especially now, when ongoing cuts to public education threaten to make inequities a chronic condition rather than a passing crisis.
It’s easy in this political era to feel powerless. But advocacy in our local community is one of the best ways to enact real change.
What now?
POPS is no longer active, but the Oakland Ed Fund has continued its work. I recently joined the Ed Fund’s advisory board to contribute to their work partnering with hundreds of local organizations like POPS working at the grassroots level to protect educational equity. Since 2003, it has raised more than $250 million for students, placed 17,000 volunteers in classrooms, and provided over $51 million directly to the district.
Now, I urge Piedmont to join me, too.
Here’s an easy first step: Attend the Ed Fund’s Oakland Grown Student Art & Music Festival on Oct. 25 to connect with Oakland’s students and educators, and learn more about the Ed Fund’s mission. We also invite you to join as a corporate sponsor, gaining powerful visibility for your company while demonstrating leadership and solidarity in this shared mission.
And, as many of you did for POPS, consider becoming a monthly donor for the Ed Fund. Your sustained support will help keep Oakland’s schools strong for the long term.
In 2020, Piedmont showed that when we act, change follows. Let’s do it again—mobilizing our resources, presence, and voices to ensure every student in our wider community has the education, and the future, we all deserve.
You can read more here about the impact of the Oakland Public Education Fund, or reach out to Kelly Yun, Chief Development Officer of the Ed Fund, at kelly@oaklandedfund.org.
Guzdar is a PHS ‘18 alum and advisory board member of the Oakland Public Education Fund. She helped found POPS with a group of PHS alums in summer 2020. You can contact her at mayaguzdar@gmail.com