Week 3

Since last Thursday, Will and I have been going to the Fresh Corner Pop Ups and have started handing out surveys to the customers. I feel it’s been beneficial for us to see the community members utilizing Fresh Corner and get to interact with them. For me, that makes the impact Fresh Corner can have more tangible, rather than just looking at sales data on Square’s webpage. Thus far we have been quite well received by the customers, have had some amusing interactions, and can recognize who some of the regulars are.

Yesterday, we were joined by an ambitious high school student who reached out to Fresh Corner and wants to do a project that, using a new and refined metric, measures the nutritional value of our meals on a five point scale. He will be rejoining us starting July 10th, and our projects ought to complement each other well: ours measuring and presenting the qualitative good gained by the customers and community, his measuring the true nutritional good gained by the customers. Both of these can prove highly valuable to Fresh Corner as they will have hard evidence to back up the good they do for their own measurements and also to present for grants.

We’ve also met both of the guys who currently operate the pop ups for FCC. I’ve only gone to pop ups with Hassan, a native Detroiter who was a Detroit Food Academy Student and currently works a managerial role for them. He’s a great guy and between him, Noam and Val, the rest of the workers in Green Garage, and the people I speak with on the streets, I feel like I’m learning about Detroit from a wide variety of possible sets of experiences and perspectives. It’s great. Especially because it seems like the problems Detroit faces and efforts to remedy them are reacted to so differently depending on a number of factors ranging from where in Detroit one has lived, what era they lived there in, strong nostalgia vs. a desire to change, and how one grew up. As somebody who has only spent a few weeks in the city, this is how I want to learn about it while I’m here.

This is a picture I took over the weekend while some of us were out for a walk along the train tracks for a couple hours. Along the way we saw some crumbling buildings, wandered in a rundown but currently in use factory, an Amtrak train, and this amazing view. In the background is Downtown, and the image as a whole holds symbolism for me. It is my hope that the revitalization in Downtown, Midtown, and a few other neighborhoods will eventually spread to the people of the other neighborhoods where there may not be such lucrative business opportunities. The focus of the continued rise of Detroit ought to be the people who have been struggling elsewhere in the city. I realize the situation isn’t this simple, but everybody deserves to benefit from any upward momentum Detroit has.