tarslis

Well, I suppose I haven’t changed that much in the last 9 weeks, given that I still spent way too long staring at the prompt for this last blog entry, willing it to write itself. I’m still anxious and hesitant every time I write. I still overthink and edit to infinity, and I’m not sure […]

Now that the program is nearing its end, it’s a little bizarre to think that it’s only been a couple months of my life. I spend almost every day working at a desk next to my mentor’s, and because of that, I hear story after story of the projects she’s been a part of, the

I know we’ve talked a lot already about how good intentions don’t always produce good results, but something happened this past week that made me want to discuss it again: my site manager discovered that there are plans in the works by a Detroit group to turn some of the land near my site into

So far, I’ve mostly spoken about how much I love my site, my supervisor, all of the people I work with, and all of the things I get to work on. And I do love it. But this week, I’ve been reflecting a lot on where I go from here. I’ve had the chance to

This week, I was lucky enough to be able to interview my site manager, Pat Bosch, Director of Nortown Community Development Corporation. Read below to see what she has to say about herself and her work. What is your professional background? How did you get involved in community work? Professionally, my degree is a Bachelors

Pretty much all of my time this week was spent focusing on engaging local businesses with our organization. The previous week, I had done a lot of business survey work – looking at land parcel data, old tax documents, and business entity search engines. The goal was to figure out what businesses existed in the

Now that we’ve read the Detroit Section of How to Kill a City, I want to talk about how it has influenced my understanding of some of the work that my site does. The story that How to Kill a City describes, of purposeful gentrification of a small portion of the city while the rest

Alright. Week 2. You’d think that by now I’d know what I’m doing? And I guess I kind of have an idea. But really, I feel a little all over the place. My site does so many things and works with so many people that every day – and almost every hour, really – is

I would like to start off by saying that I’m a little overwhelmed right now. Not by my site – by this blog post. I kind of hate introducing myself, especially when I have to do it in writing. There’s so much more pressure to get it right, because you can always go back and