Town Heroes is a profile series featuring people who grew up in Oakland and are making a positive contribution to their hometown. Know of someone who you think we should feature? Email azucena@oaklandside.org.
Jessica Scortt Bell was a student at Laney College when she realized she wanted to get into social work and help Oakland’s youth.
“I wasn’t sure what that path would look like, and Laney was great to help me figure it out,” she said.
Bell also took a social work class at Berkeley City College, which cemented her decision to pursue a career in social work. For Bell, social work is the most practical approach to tackling some of the community’s most intractable issues, deploying a comprehensive toolset and a “lot of compassion” to understand mental health challenges.
Bell had been doing hair since middle school and working as a hairstylist in her spare time. “I was building up a clientele. It wasn’t something that I wanted to pursue professionally if I’m being honest,” she said. “I didn’t feel like it was prestigious enough for what people’s expectations of me were. I did not want to be the girl from Oakland who did hair.”
From Laney College, she transferred to San Francisco State and graduated in 2013 with a degree in social work. Bell worked as a social worker for San Mateo County, but she had to quit soon after starting to become her mom’s full-time caretaker after she suffered a heart attack.
Bell returned to being a hairstylist, where, besides helping her clients look good, she got to hear and see situations they were going through. The problems she heard people discuss sparked an idea —using her network from her time as a social worker to help them.
While she had a reliable network, Bell feels the system social workers deal with poses challenges when trying to help people in crisis.
“Well, there’s no housing in this county; you have to tell your client to move out of the county,” she said. “I didn’t like the bureaucracy. It got frustrating.”
Outfitted with a network and the help of two friends, she began assisting the clients who came to her for hair help, not knowing that pouring their souls out to Bell would also turn into obtaining resources.
“We connected people to housing, employment, and therapy. I have clients from different walks of life who would have never interacted in another environment. In certain situations, I’d have a client who is a lawyer and one who needed a lawyer,” she said. “Another time, a client needed to offload furniture while someone else had just gotten approved for housing and needed furnishings. I saw these connections hundreds of times just within my chair, and I’m one person.”
Raised and educated in The Town
Bell lived on 11th Avenue growing up, and she affectionately recalls walking from her house to the City of Oakland Head Start Center at San Antonio Park to attend Pre-K.
“I remember riding my bike all around Head Start,” Bell said of her time there. “We got to do arts and crafts and enjoy nature all through the park.”
Bell was a gifted student at an early age, so much so that she skipped 2nd grade while attending Franklin Elementary. By the time she reached 6th grade at just nine years old, she found being at Roosevelt Middle School a scary experience.
“I was really intimidated,” she said. “On the first day of school, I cried and would not get out the car.”
As her first year went on, her grades declined significantly. Her parents decided it was time to find a school with a smaller class size where she could thrive again.
In 2001, Bell enrolled at American Indian Public Charter School (AIPCS), led by controversial principal Dr. Ben Chavis. Students attending AIPCS excelled academically, but there were allegations of excessive discipline, mistreatment of students, and fraud. The charges of fraud against Davis were dropped in 2019.
Despite the bad reputation AIPCS received, Bell credits the school with giving her the resources OUSD didn’t offer.
“My experience was amazing,” Bell said. “I wouldn’t have had that at a public school.” But she also knows she missed out on sports and other after-school programs the charter didn’t provide. “When I got to Laney College, it was my first time seeing a school football team.”
When Bell turned 11, her family moved to North Oakland. Still, she continued her education at schools in East Oakland and used public transportation to cross the city.
“I would have to take the 88 to the 57, or the 88 to the 40,” Bell said about riding AC Transit. “When I have children, I want them to ride the bus. Because, who are you if you don’t? You learn about life on AC Transit.”
After AIPCS, Bell attended the University Preparatory Charter Academy for high school. Shortly after she graduated, the charter school closed in 2007 due to the forgery of school documents.
Between her schooling, Bell took advantage of Oakland nonprofits that provided programs for young people. At 15, she joined Youth Uprising, an organization in deep East Oakland focused on providing educational and career support.
“There are not a lot of places that feel like they are for us, by us, and Youth Uprising felt like that,” Bell said. “Too Short was there all the time helping kids in the recording studio.”
Bell said that Youth Uprising empowered kids and gave them venues to express themselves.
“Looking back, I can only imagine what those kids would be doing if they weren’t at Youth Uprising,” she said. “It was rough back then. We lost a lot of young people.”
Bell recalled a friend who had a part-time job and used the money to buy a new pair of sneakers. One day, while getting off work late, her friend was robbed and pistol-whipped. The assailants took all of his belongings, including his homework.
“There are so many pivotal moments in a young boy’s life,” she said. “I remember him saying it won’t happen again. That means having a gun for protection. It always starts off like that.”
Bell said kids today don’t have access to jobs like she did as a teenager. Nonprofits and other organizations that serve youth often need help finding long-lasting funding for their programming.
“No wonder their understanding of responsibility and ownership is different,” she said. “Opening up and creating places where they are seen as valuable, where they can have responsibilities, but they see it as fun is crucial. A lot of times in the hood, you view your options for success as such limited things.”
Bell never saw limitations to her potential, and she credits her mom with always pushing her to accomplish anything she set her eyes on.
“My mom would say that if you work hard enough, you can be anything and always put your education first even though it is going to be difficult,” Bell said. When I tell you she thinks I can do anything, she thinks I walk on water.”
In 2017, she went back to school to obtain her cosmetology license. In 2020, she enrolled at UC Berkeley to get her Master’s degree in social welfare.
“It was the worst thing that ever happened to me. It was a learning experience,” Bell said of starting at UC Berkeley right before the pandemic began. “I did the entire program in my living room, never stepping foot on campus, and they did not give us a discount.”
Dealing with the hurdles of running a nonprofit
As more of Bell’s clients recounted the type of help they needed while she was doing their hair, she, equipped with what she had learned in school and as a social worker, came up with the idea of a centralized hub where community members could get a range of services for both physical and emotional needs — a haircut, legal and housing help, a session with a therapist, or even a dance class.
“When you can have all these resources under one roof, you just closed down that barrier,” she said. “It’s just so much more realistic.”
Bell decided to take on even more clients to save up money and bring her idea of this resource hub to life.
In May 2022, she opened The Self-i.s.h. Society. The “i-s-h” stands for identity, support, and hope and is located at the corner of the shopping plaza at Foothill Boulevard and Seminary Avenue. Self-i.s.h. is the space she had envisioned back in 2017 while helping her clients at her at-home salon.
“I 100% feel this is where I’m most connected. Not necessarily Seminary but from 35th Avenue and on,” she said of opening up in East Oakland close to the high school she attended.
Other organizations like the Black Cultural Zone and Youth Uprising are on this side of town, and she saw it as a way to create momentum for the work each group is doing to serve the same community.
Self-i.s.h. partners with individuals and organizations, and Bell pays them through grants. In the summer of 2023, the City of Oakland’s Department of Violence Prevention awarded Bell a $15,000 grant. Self-i.s.h. currently offers free massages twice a month, dance classes on Sundays, therapy, and other resources depending on grant funding and who is available.
Bell handles all of the logistics and administrative work for Self-i.s.h. and has found that grant writing is one of the most arduous tasks and does not always result in funding.
“Oakland is in such a deficit, and people are pulled in a million different directions,” she said. We are in this chicken-and-egg stage: They want to see the numbers to know they can fund us, and we need funding to give them the numbers.”
Bell is applying for another grant through the Department of Violence Prevention, which will help sustain the resources provided at Self-i.s.h. for two years.
“I truly believe and hope that people who are looking for innovative responses can see the value of the work we do,” Bell said. “I’m going to keep shooting for the grants until we connect with somebody who sees the same thing or understands the culture enough to see that. We don’t realize how empowered we can be to other people if we share our stories.”
