Hello, I’m Adesewa Ojo a rising sophomore majoring in History. I’m working with the City of Detroit’s Office of Disability Affairs office under the guidance of Christopher Samp. To me, community means having a group of people with a common goal or interest in which mutual support occurs. I was attracted to doing community work mostly because of the component of engagement with the community, meaning you are working with them and not making decisions or judgments for them as an outsider. A strength I have from previous experience is a research experience with the regular UROP program in reading/analyzing historical documents. This will help me in my new project because a major component of researching the inequities Detroit’s Black population faces has to do a lot with the historical roots of these inequities that still exist in a sometimes subliminal form. A strength I would like to develop is communication, in the next phase of my research I will be directly interviewing community members, so being able to have an effective conversation will improve the clarity of my research presentation and highlight the community members affected. I think I would be proud at the end of the program if I saw that my research was implemented into the office’s plans with other stakeholders to start some kind of material project in improving Detroit’s accessibility.
