In Memory of David Cobb

We lost a dear friend and colleague this September. David Cobb, our Onboarding Director and North Coast Regional Rep, passed away on Labor Day. David gave over 30 years to social justice and the fight for democracy, and he’d been with this Alliance since 2019. Much of what we’ve built carries his fingerprints, from onboarding new organizers to representing our coalition up north and nationwide.

Beyond CPBA, David spent decades working across the movement, including with The Democracy Collaborative, the Green Party, and the US Solidarity Economy Network.

His longtime friend Jim Reed wrote a beautiful tribute to him, shared at the request of David’s partner, Ruthi Engelke. Read it here: link.

A celebration of life will be held Saturday, October 3 at 2pm at the Arcata Playhouse, 1251 9th St, Arcata, CA.

We’ll miss him. And we’re grateful for every year we got to work alongside him.

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With that grief also comes gratitude for the movement he helped build. Here’s what’s been happening across CPBA…

Public Banking Listening Session

Hella Bees, a Black-owned restaurant and bar in Oakland, was buzzing Thursday evening August 27 when community members from the East Bay and San Francisco came together to talk about public banking and what it could mean for their communities. Four small groups of 8-10 people, mostly people of color, dug into the financial challenges they face and discussed how regional public banks might work.

Jointly organized by End Poverty in California (EPIC), SF Public Bank, Public Bank East Bay, and the California Public Banking Alliance, this roundtable showed how organizations can collaborate to make positive change. Many people new to public banking learned about public banking ballot measures this November: Berkeley’s Measure Z, a parcel tax to capitalize a regional public bank, and San Francisco’s Proposition B, which would authorize a Municipal Finance Corporation now and a public bank later.

Special thanks to Michael Tubbs, Founder of EPIC and former Mayor of Stockton, and to Nikki Fortunato Bas, Alameda County Supervisor for joining the listening session, and to Rick Girling of CPBA and Reina Tello of PODER SF for facilitating.

Photos: End Poverty in California

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TED Films: Who Controls Your City’s Money

Take 5 minutes to watch Trinity Tran, 2026 TED Fellow and the Executive Director of CPBA, explain why public banking is critical in building a community-led financial ecosystem. With visuals that amplify her message, Trinity presents an overview of public banking that educates and provides public banking advocates with tools to succeed in establishing public banks.

https://www.ted.com/talks/trinity_tran_who_controls_your_city_s_money

To get a deeper dive on the public banking movement, listen to Who Controls Your City’s Money, a TED Talks Daily podcast featuring an interview with Trinity where she discusses how her meditating combined with her protesting against the Dakota Access Pipeline led her to a growing commitment to democratizing finance. Trinity emphasizes that money is power, the power to decide which investments should be prioritized and that this power should not be exclusively in the hands of Wall Street bankers. The history of the nation’s only state public bank, the Bank of North Dakota, and the broad system of public banks in Germany are explored as inspirations for the burgeoning public banking movement in California and beyond.    

TED Talks Daily: https://open.spotify.com/episode/42yH48wLfzVNKc9Y3dytw4

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Welcome Thomas Hanna, CPBA’s Legislative and Policy Advisor

We’re excited to welcome Thomas Hanna to CPBA as a volunteer Legislative and Policy Advisor! Thomas is VP of Research at The Democracy Collaborative and a longtime ally of the California and national public banking movement. He’s spent years studying public ownership and banking, and he’s been in the trenches with us before, co-authoring “Constructing the Democratic Public Bank,” a governance proposal for the Los Angeles public bank published after the California Public Banking Act passed.

Thomas is also the author of Our Common Wealth: The Return of Public Ownership in the United States (Manchester University Press, 2018), and of “The Crisis Next Time: Planning for Public Ownership as an Alternative to Corporate Bank Bailouts” (Next System Project, 2018), both foundational reads if you want to dig deeper into the case for public finance and public ownership. We’re grateful to have his expertise on our team as we push this work forward.