FROM OAKLAND TO THE WORLD: BOSS COMMUNITY VOICES JOIN AN INTERNATIONAL PORTAL FOR PEACE

For over fifty years, BOSS has worked alongside the people most impacted by housing instability, incarceration, and community violence, not as subjects of study, but as partners in building solutions. The expertise that lives in our community has always been central to how we design programs, shape advocacy, and define what safety and healing actually look like in practice. That work is now being recognized on an international stage.

We are proud to share that the Firsthand Indicators of Safety developed in partnership with our BOSS community members have been invited to be included in Voices of Peace, an international open-access data portal that collects and shares community-generated indicators of peace, justice, and social change from across the globe. The portal houses over 20,000 indicators from communities around the world, each one representing how people themselves define and experience safety, peace, and dignity in their daily lives. Built on the Everyday Peace Indicators methodology and the Grounded Accountability Model, it exists to shift how peace and development are understood, measured, and debated by centering the perspectives of the people living inside those realities.

Our indicators will be featured alongside those global voices, with full acknowledgement of BOSS and the community members who helped co-create them.

This invitation is a direct reflection of the work we have been doing in Oakland for decades, and most recently through Breaking Barriers, our biennial convening hosted in partnership with Californians for Safety and Justice, CSSJ, REPAC, and a growing coalition of organizations committed to reimagining safety. Breaking Barriers brings together community members, returning citizens, advocates, service providers, and policymakers to build a shared, community-centered vision of what safety means and how it is achieved. The conversations that emerge from that table — grounded in lived experience, shaped by people who understand the stakes personally — are exactly the kind of participatory knowledge that Voices of Peace was built to elevate.

The connection between these two efforts is meaningful. When our community members sit down at Breaking Barriers to define what safety looks and feels like in their neighborhoods, they are doing something that most policy processes never make room for. They are shaping the terms of the conversation. The Firsthand Indicators of Safety that came out of that work are now part of a global resource that researchers, advocates, and policymakers across the world will be able to explore, learn from, and build upon.

We are grateful to Naomi and the Voices of Peace team for this recognition, and we are proud of every community member whose participation, honesty, and insight made these indicators possible. Their contributions to this portal represent something important, not just for BOSS, but for the broader understanding of what peace requires and how communities define it when given the opportunity to do so on their own terms.

WHAT IS VOICES OF PEACE?

The Voices of Peace Data Portal provides open access to community-generated indicators of peace, justice, and social change from across the world. Users can explore the dataset by theme, location, and keywords — supporting research, policy, and practice that is grounded in how communities actually experience these concepts. Rather than offering universal metrics, the portal honors the diversity of lived experience.

Learn more → Voices of Peace portal link