Week 1

Dear Ayat,

This week is your first week living in Midtown. You’re happy, because you’re getting along well with your roommates, and you have a supervisor who values your opinion and wants you to feel valued in your work space.

You’re working with parents and educators in different parts of the city, and right now, you’re spending your time getting to know the different problems that DPS are facing. You’re spending a lot of your time understanding the effects of not providing adequate training and compensation for educators has created a brain drain in the city that leaves Detroit’s youngest children at risk. The project you’re working on involves providing resources for parents and educators to create art based educational opportunities for children.

From this program, I’d really like to learn more the specific issues that face different communities in Detroit. I also want to get to know the city in a more intimate way, besides the confines of Midtown and Downtown. On a professional level, I want to learn how to get my information into the hands of people who can take action with it.

As far as what I contribute to the organization, my work is in three parts. The first is the Art for Learning’s Sake project, where we get art education resources into the hands of early childhood educators. The second part is Project 6’7, where we’re creating a resource for young children to understand the history of the race riots, for their 50th anniversary. The third part is a project of my own choosing, that I’m still currently thinking about and working on.

My current image of Detroit is that it’s a city with warm people and a rich culture and history. Detroit is so much more than Midtown and Downtown, and I look forward to being in the residential parts of Detroit during the later weeks of the project.

Ayat