Twice a month the Black Rock Collective convenes at Oakland climbing gyms — and a downtown floor that usually reads overwhelmingly white becomes something closer to two-thirds Black or brown. Same wall, a different room.

On a recent Thursday evening inside Great Western Power Company — the downtown Oakland climbing gym named for the steam plant that once occupied the building — about a dozen people were hanging off plastic holds bolted 30 and 40 feet up the wall. Nothing about the room was different: the same lead walls, the same chalk, the same routes. What was different was who had convened it.

On most nights the floor at a climbing gym reads overwhelmingly white — climbing is, as KQED put it in an Aug. 5 feature on the scene, an overwhelmingly white sport. On this night, KQED reported, roughly two-thirds of the climbers on the floor were Black or brown. The difference was a standing appointment: the Black Rock Collective, a meetup for Black climbers that now gathers at least twice a month at Oakland gyms.

The numbers explain why the room usually looks the way it does. USA Climbing's 2023 internal diversity scorecard counted about 22% people of color among its 25,000-plus dues-paying members, KQED reported; surveys of climber demographics put the share of Black climbers somewhere between 1 and 1.5%. A floor that reads two-thirds Black or brown, in that context, is not a coincidence. It is built.

It was built one flyer at a time. Founder Brittney Butler fell for the sport in 2020, climbing outdoors near Tahoe during the pandemic, and kept noticing she was the only Black person on the crag. "I want to be perceived by people I feel comfortable with," she told KQED. She walked into Pacific Pipe — Touchstone Climbing's West Oakland gym at 2140 Mandela Parkway, which the company says was the largest climbing facility in the country when it opened — and asked whether it would host an event for Black climbers. She put up flyers and posted to Instagram. About 30 people turned up for the first meetup in December 2021. Someone brought Jamaican food. Over time the collective built a fund to cover rental gear and day passes for climbers who couldn't swing the cost.

The gyms themselves have a formal on-ramp for exactly this. Touchstone, a public benefit corporation whose corporate charter lists diversity, equity and inclusion among five principles, runs a slate of "affinity groups" across its locations — the institutional version of the room Butler assembled by hand.

Butler has since moved to Arizona, but the meetups continue. Philip Lang, who raps as Philip Bank$, now organizes the Great Western nights, KQED reported; the collective has also run outdoor climbing expeditions. The lead surfaced this week on r/bayarea, pointing back to the KQED piece.

What someone walking past the downtown gym would notice depends entirely on which night they picked. Same wall, same holds, same chalk — a different room, twice a month, because someone decided to convene it.