Established in 1971, Opportunities Industrialization Center (OIC) of Washington is an economic development and career training agency in Yakima, Washington, providing education, training, and supportive services to low-income and rural communities. As one of 30 Community Action agencies in Washington State, OIC offers services through three divisions: Education and Career Services, Support Services, and Outreach, Recruitment, and Data Services.
Over 50 years, OIC has worked with community, local, state, and federal partners to help residents become self-sufficient through programs like job skills training, high school completion, energy assistance, emergency food assistance, home efficiency and energy conservation, youth, and senior services.
The Mission is to help in the elimination of unemployment, poverty, illiteracy, and racism so all people can live with greater human dignity.
Improving the world by empowering people.
All people deserve respect, dignity, opportunity, education, and upward mobility to become self-sufficient.
We are headquartered, physically in Yakima, which rests on the ancestral lands of the fourteen Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation. The people of the Yakama Nation inhabited more than 12 million acres across Adams, Benton, Chelan, Douglas, Franklin, Grant, Kittitas, Klickitat, and Yakima Counties. Today, we honor those native peoples who are tied to the land through history, legends, and culture. We acknowledge their descendants who live in the world today. We thank the caretakers of this land, who have lived here and continue to live here since time immemorial.
We acknowledge the legacy of slavery and oppression in our region. From the enslaved African people to the continued exploitation of migrant communities of Asian, Pacific Islander, Latinx, and other BIPOC communities whose labor was exploited for generations to help establish the economy of our region and the United States, specifically the production and harvest of surplus crops and land cultivation.
This acknowledgment is enacted to show respect and is a step toward correcting the stories and practices that erase Indigenous people’s history and culture. It also honors the truth. As a community action agency, we will continue to build upon our relations with the Yakama Nation.