In the past week, I learned a lot from my assigned researches about the Detroit demographic and economic development non-profit landscape. My co-workers and I did a deep dive into Detroit immigrant population to assist with ProsperUs immigrant fellowship application. I noticed through census data that two neighborhoods close to Dearborn and Hamtramck has absorbed an outsized proportion of immigrant recent years and they are predominantly from Asia; I would really love to bike to these two places one day. I also developed a more concrete sense of the day-to-day work of different economic development agencies. While some of them focus on lending and business coaching like us, others also provide workforce matching, vocational skills training, and real estate matching to help businesses expand or set up brick and mortar locations for the first time. There are a lot of work for new businesses to navigate through this patchwork of resources, but there are also people from different non-profits who is willing to go out of their way to help them( like Matthew from ours). I’m very satisfied with getting more and more immersed in my organization’s work and looking forward to my interview with some of our past trainees.
