If I could describe the HOPE Village culture in one word, it would be empowered. While the HVR full-time staff comprises of only 4 people, this doesn’t stop them from creating sustainable projects that benefit their community. All the staff members live in the HOPE Village, which means that they truly know the community’s needs …
Through my work with Detroit Public Schools Community District (DPSCD), I have learned a lot about how Detroit views education – specifically public k-12 education. While the projects that I am working on fall into different categories, they are all under the umbrella of enrollment. My goal is to help the district find improvements in …
In the last two weeks I have learned so much about food insecurity in general, but even more about how prevalent it is within Detroit communities. People have associated Detroit with being a food desert because of the lack of access to healthy places to purchase food, but in reality it’s better defined as an …
Deadline Detroit has recently been covering the Black Lives Matter protests, as well as the calls for the divestment/defunding of the police. I feel as though I have been able to intimately come to understand Detroit as it was, and as the residents hope to see it. My boss, Violet Ikonomova, interviewed activists such as …
In my short time working with Detroiters and learning more about the city firsthand, I’ve learned a lot about people’s attitudes towards their communities. Detroiters are proud of where they’re from, probably more so than most other people. They care about their community and they don’t want to see it taken advantage of like has …
Working at EcoWorks has been very insightful in many ways. Recently, I have gained how immersed and interdependent non-profit organizations are in Detroit. Their interdependence with the community they serve and collaborative initiatives with communities such as Yorkshire, HOPE Village, and South West Detroit has provided me more context and knowledge of how community decisions …
I have learned so much about Detroit through my internship at Friends of Parkside! To start, I learned how much this organization gives back to the community in terms of resources and virtual discussions. Especially during this quarantine time, many people aren’t leaving their homes and they heavily depend on the donations and contributions this …
I don’t live in Detroit, or better yet even Michigan. I didn’t even know that Detroit was in Michigan until I came to the University of Michigan. And yet, here I was falling more and more passionate with a city I am still discovering for myself. Through different extracirricular acitivities I’m invovled with, talking with …
I’ve been working with Brilliant Detroit for three weeks and yet I still find myself learning more and more about their place in Detroit. I think a large part of this has to do with how good they are about responding to and paying attention to the needs of their community. Brilliant Detroit is centered …
Detroit is BIG—that’s what I learned. I suppose this is obvious, but the scale became far more concrete to me when I viewed it on a scale that’s easier to comprehend.This week I compiled a list of all of the public and charter schools in Detroit. There were 178. I can’t speak for anyone else, …
