Wilson Riles Wilson Riles was a member of the Oakland City Council from 1979 to 1992, and served as the Pacific Mountain Regional Director of the American Friends Service Committee for ten years. He ran for Mayor of Oakland against Jerry Brown in 2002, and then became Principal of Oakland's High School for Social Justice. In 2006 he was a member of the Aimee Allison for Oakland City Council campaign team, and he is currently active in our recently-formed Greens of Color group.
Wilson Riles: A Life of Public Service Wilson Riles has been serving the people of Oakland and the Bay Area in countless ways. He was the Regional Director of the American Friends Service Committee for over nine years and administered a $1.4 million budget supporting programs which addressed issues of economic justice in the African American community; non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the plight of farm workers, homelessness, progressive reform of the criminal justice system, Native American and Asian Pacific Islander community concerns, and youth empowerment. Wilson Riles engineered the City's commitment of $1.3 million from the Redevelopment Agency for the Schools' Academies programs. He was instrumental in the defeat of the INS establishment of a privately run detention facility in Oakland. Riles was the principal Council member responsible for both Oakland's Anti-apartheid Ordinance and Oakland's Nuclear Free Zone Ordinance. He was the strongest Council member supporting the development of downtown and neighborhood non-profit housing projects. Wilson earned a BA degree in psychology and math from Stanford University in 1968. He attended graduate school in educational psychology and child development at UC Berkeley. He was a Peace Corps volunteer from 1968 to 1970 in Sierra Leone, where he taught mathematics. He was also a math teacher in Oakland. Wilson is a founding member of Community Bank of the Bay. He lectures regularly on the history of race at New College. He is active in many other civic and community organizations, including the San Francisco Zen Center, the Northern California Coalition for Immigrant Rights, the Faith Alliance with Interfaith to Heal Society (FAITHS), and FONKOZE (a Haitian micro-loan program). Wilson's life partner is Patricia St.Onge, an organizational development consultant for nonprofits. Between the two, they have six children and three grandchildren. A legacy of public service was passed on to Wilson by his father, Wilson Riles, Sr., a former State Superintendent of Public Instruction and the first African American elected to statewide office in California. |
