First Week at Michigan Suburbs Alliance

It has been an amazing first week at MSA. As soon as I arrived, I absolutely fell in love with downtown Ferndale and the office space. I did get a little lost in finding the space but luckily my supervisor came to the rescue. The Ferndale office (since there is a Ypsilanti office as well) is a small space with an open lay out with a blue room for meetings and a white board room (as in you can write on the walls) for thinking things out. There are tables in the main area for anyone to use and a little kitchen area. The space is versatile so you can just about work anywhere and there are large windows as well as sky windows so light is not a problem.

The people at MSA are very enivronmentally friendly, down to earth, funny, and warm people. This is something I realized the first day of working. Emily, my supervisor, got me acquainted with everyone as well as oriented. She was quite packed that day with meetings so I was not able to start my project right away so I spent the time looking through JungleDisk which is a cloud software that manages all of the organization’s files  to get myself acquainted to Mayors Millenials Congress (MMC) which is the sub organization that I will be working with.

Tuesdays are also the day in which all the interns are present in the office space (there are three others) and wanting to introduce us on the organization’s website, we went out for a photo shoot to better get to know one another and downtown Ferndale (which is gorgeous and fun). Here’s a photo below of all of us next to the town’s interested public art.

The next day I was able to sit down with Emily and talk about what I would be working on for the rest of the summer. Basically, MSA is vetting topics for MMC for 2014 and this is the first time MSA has gotten the chance to do the research on potential topics in order to recommend one for the following year.  In the past, MMC has picked the topic and MSA has worked to research it in the year in which they would work on it without knowing the possible complications that could arise. Therefore, this summer, I will be looking at the following three topics and researching their viability in Metro Detroit as well as its regional impact. Another very important factor is whether local government can play a role in implementing the program.

• How local government can positively impact K-12 Education
• Best Parks and Recreation Practices
• How local government can encourage entrepreneurship

We set up deadlines for literature reviews, case studies, and SWOT analysis as well as discussing how I would go about researching the topics. I first needed to narrow down the topics to potential programs to implement next year. I started off with K-12 Education and doing a general research trying to familiarize myself with how local government works with education. It turned out to be a pretty long process in which I realized Michigan’s education school districts are often separated from the local city council. I also could not determine whether any possible program would be innovative enough that the MMC would consider it as well as whether it would meet the goal of having a regional impact. I voiced my concerns to Emily who gave me a few people to talk to as well as the extent of her experience with education. But, it seemed most people did not have much experience with education and were as stuck as I was. I guess, it is now up to me to keep researching and eventually, determining an innovative program that MMC could utilize to better education for Metro Detroit.

Since, I did not see much luck with education; I became exhausted of it and decided to move on to parks and recreation which is faring to be a much more specific topic that I can now better find resources for. I have already found quite a bit of literature as well as a few case studies and am finding the idea of innovating space building for parks an appealing idea.

To finish the week off, I also learned the pains of finance in a non profit. The three million dollar grant that MSA was given a few years ago is now finished and so MSA had to in the past month lay off half of their workforce which brings them from a 14 person organization to a 7 person organization doubling the work for all the employees. I made good friends with one of the employees, Joel, who had to leave last Friday and it was quite sad to see him go. Conan, our boss, tried to stay positive and they had even ensured that most of the people leaving had another job before they left. On Joel’s leaving day, Conan brought us Faygos in fancy glass bottles (because I was underage and could not drink, he didn’t bring alcohol beverages, which was a bit awkward) and everyone said their goodbyes.

Overall, I think what I took away from my first week are the pains of researching as well as the hardworking personalities of employees at a non-profit organization.