The Mission of Oakland & the World Enterprises (OAW), a nonprofit organization, is to launch for-profit businesses for cooperative ownership by formerly incarcerated people and 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 procured a 3/4 acre plot of land located at the corner of 7th & Campbell Streets in West Oakland, CA. At this site OAW will construct a 79-unit 100% affordable housing complex for people with very low and extremely low incomes, including formerly homeless and formerly incarcerated. OAW will launch four new businesses on the ground floor of our 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 building The Black Panther.

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Seventh Street was called the Harlem of the west back in the day and was 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 some other spot there, like 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 the new development.