Week 2: Garden Galore

This summer I am interning for Voices for Earth Justice. This interfaith nonprofit with an environmental justice focus connects community members with the earth, themselves, and others through prayer, education, and action.  I’m spending most of my time at the property Voices for Earth Justice owns, Hope House. The house and education center sits on 5 lots in the Brightmoor neighborhood in northwest Detroit. The house is where Naim, my supervisor, lives and works. The education center is a space to do indoor programming, but the building needs more restoration work and reorganizing. The best parts of the Hope House property are the different gardens, where we grow vegetables, fruits, various plants native to southeast Michigan, flowers, and whatever interesting plants we come across and choose to grow.

My first week and a half of work has consisted of a lot of gardening. Naim and I have created garden beds, tilled up the ground, planted many vegetables and other plants, and cleaned up around the garden. We also installed benches around the Little Library on the property and by the Peace Pole, a post in the ground on which each of the four sides reads “May Peace Prevail on Earth” in different languages of different cultures and religions. We have also started doing outreach to get people to participate in the summer program that Voices is piloting this summer, the Resiliency Camp, which will be the focus of my research project.

While I am not doing any hard data collection or direct surveying, I am spending the summer observing and trying to improve how the small nonprofit that is Voices for Earth Justice connects to community members and improves their lives, whether it be through education in responsibility and ecology, promoting peace, or simply providing a space for community members to enjoy a garden. For my project, I want to report on how community education such as the resiliency course is important in areas like Detroit where there is a housing crisis and systemic racism. Naim is involved in community land trust coalitions and we spend time reading and talking about the housing situation in Detroit, so I want to tie that into my presentation.

I love living in Detroit even more than I thought I would. I’m having so much fun with the other DCBRPers, and am also loving living by myself and figuring things out like cooking and keeping things orderly (kind of). I definitely see a lot of similarities in Detroit to my hometown Saginaw, and I am already developing a soft spot for the neighborhood I work in, as community members always come by when Naim and I are working in the garden. Looking forward for the weeks to come!