Celebrating our hard work in front of the mural — with Ian Studders, Jela Ellefson, Katy Wyerman, Melissa J. Smiley, Michael Forsyth, Jeanet Kulcsar, Celeste Layne, John Corcoran, Owiso Makuku, Dara O'Byrne, Marcus Clarke, Sarida Scott Montgomery and Allyson McLean

On one of the first warm days this summer, the Fellows concluded our monthly session with Detroit Mural Factory(DMF) gardens.

We met director Halima Cassells in a vibrant lot on the Northend, tucked behind a party store at the corner of Kenilworth and Woodward Avenue, near the house where Halima’s father was born and where she is raising her own family today. Like many of us, Halima is a relatively recent returnee to Detroit, having left for college and then to work in the arts in Brooklyn before coming back to her hometown.

Her street is rich in community, with multiple gardens, works of art, and a refurbished firehouse that in itself represents a piece of the neighborhood’s history. The fellows circled up with Halima and a few other volunteers, sharing experiences (or joking about lack of experience) with both art and gardening, prior to receiving instructions for the afternoon’s assignment.

Some of the more artistic-minded fellows joined Halima’s daughter to continue building off the mural behind the adjacent party store, adding images of vegetables, insects, and flowers. Other fellows worked in the garden, clearing the space of weeds to make way for new vegetables and herbs including bell peppers, tomatoes, and basil. Throughout the course of the afternoon, neighbors and schoolchildren stopped by on their way home to check out our progress, with some kids asking how they too could get involved.

It was a rewarding experience – we all enjoyed our time in the sunshine, getting our hands dirty, and getting to know both each other and the community better.

What a gift.

It was almost immediate — I designed a quick concept sketch on how to engage local community based organizations to offer a creative response to this exhibition. Over time, through the collaboration of the museum and the Knight Foundation, we designed a community photography project that empowered residents and local organizations to access the museum and execute their own engagement goals in new ways.

On the cusp of a grant to support the project and the leap of faith that the DIA was willing to take to make this project a reality, I wrote these words in October.

REVEAL YOUR DETROIT

Detroit is in the eye of its beholders.

Home to countless identities, narratives and perspectives, to claim Detroit is to claim oneself in this sea of diverse possibility.

How then has Detroit achieved the profound distinction as the epitome of American decay and unrelenting collapse, failure, and ruin?

Such narrative begs the question: is this the image Detroit residents carry about their city?

For some perhaps, but certainly not for most.

Detroit is a complex entity. To see Detroit through its citizens’ eyes is to see Detroit’s kaleidoscopic reality in powerful, even beautiful ways. Whether a city or regional resident, this truth emerges everywhere one dares to ask.

Detroit’s narrative is central to our local identity. Detroit’s ruin narrative too quickly overshadows the importance of empowering residents to own their own story. For the narrative to truly shift, we must conscientiously solicit the voice of Detroit residents who are fully capable of imagining Detroit’s next transformative era through their own unique experiences and perspectives.

In part, we must slow down the imagery and focus on particulars. To discern the contours of the whole, sometimes we must expose the minute details.

Indeed, words allow one conversation about Detroit. Images allow another.

If a picture is worth a 1,000 words, then we should do our utmost to capture as many as possible. In Detroit, with the DIA’s support, this is our chance to empower local residents and give them voice. We can learn together by what we share and how we each carry this city in our minds eye. Let’s give residents that chance to be the artists and trust them to show us what they find beautiful. Let’s let residents Reveal Detroit for themselves and give them a forum to display their images for all to see.

I truly believed this was a critical opportunity not to be missed.

With the generous grant from the Knight Foundation, we were able to connect with over 50 community groups, 750 residents, and our social media channels as well.

All told, over 12,000 images were produced by Detroiters about the city they love.

Honestly, I’ll never look at Detroit the same way again. Over 2,000 images comprise the Reveal Your Detroit display at the Detroit Public Library. It is an unabashedly local and undeniably beautiful compilation. Indeed, it is a digital photography display like no other I’ve ever seen.

I’m biased sure. I’m proud too of course. But, above all, I’m overwhelmed and humbled by the response.

Detroit is passion personified in every person that takes part and believes in this place; whether born here or not, this is our common bond.

My photographs? My Detroit? Very similar to everyone else — some intimate shots of my home and the places in this city that give my time her identity, texture and purpose.

LISTEN: WDET radio interview

WATCH:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azqKdrkE_2Q

Here’s an email about it that I’ve sent to friends. Pass it on!

Hello Friends,

I am the Citizen Philanthropist for my North End Music Melody Makers-Detroit Project. I need to raise $3636 to reach my project’s financial goal to implement the Musical Education program.

This program is Education with an Arts and Culture focus thru Music! The funds for this project will provide for a group of 15 Detroit-area youth (ages 7-10) and their caregivers to participate in a once weekly, 3-hour music appreciation class for 12 weeks. Two mature educators with over 20 years of experience in music education, including symphony instruction, will donate their time and expertise to share a deeper understanding and appreciation of music.

Youth participants will benefit from building self confidence, improving self discipline and enhancing intellectual capacity. Research indicates that children exposed to music education are better problem solvers.

Parents and caregivers engaged in the support of the music program for their child will learn about the value of music education, and will also see improved self discipline and pride. Educator’s lives will be enriched by engaging youth and bridging the inter-generational gap between youth and their elders. By donating their time and knowledge, they pass a legacy of self-worth and commitment to Detroit-area youth.

There is a story behind how this idea came to me for a music program in the North End of Detroit. It’s a cute story, and I look forward to sharing with you. See it here on YouTube.

This project needs you! If you donate $10, we can reach our financial goal. Please take the time to read about my project and make your donation online today by clicking on this link.

Share this project with Family and Friends!

I discussed planning, Hamtramck, baseball, and duck blood soup with Tom Habitz over crepes at Good Girls Go to Paris in Midtown.  A condensed version of our lively conversation is below.

Dara O’Byrne: Have you ever lived outside of Michigan?

No. I grew up in Dearborn and Northville, went to University of Michigan for my undergraduate degree, and then I went straight to graduate school at Wayne State in Urban Planning.

DO: What did you study at Michigan?

Economics 

DO: Wow. Economics at Michigan– that’s pretty hard core.  What made you take the leap from Economics to Urban Planning?

I decided I wasn’t going to pursue a business career immediately.  Planning was attractive for many reasons.  And it seemed like a good option for making a career in Detroit because there might actually be jobs in planning. The summer after I graduated, I started hanging out in Detroit all the time and thinking a lot about planning.  WSU was a great opportunity because I was able to really become immersed in Detroit. While in graduate school, I got the opportunity to work for Henry Ford Health System as an intern and then they hired me full time after I graduated.

DO: So, you are the only planner at Henry Ford.  How is that? Do you feel like you offer a different perspective?

I think that really is what my job is – to offer a unique perspective. Our department is responsible for the long term visioning and positioning of projects.  But that can bump up against daily practical realities. It’s not always easy being a planner – to offer what can look like a competing viewpoint of the world.  We’re a nonprofit and we’re here to serve the community, but we have a bottom line.  We struggle with the tradeoffs associated with efficiently delivering world class medical care with what is best for community.  The planner has to look at all of those angles from a holistic point of view. 

The best part is that we have good support for what we are doing from the highest levels in the organization.  By the presence of our small department, we’ve helped solidify and lend support for lots of great initiatives in Midtown.  There is a lot of vision on the part of our CEO and everyone else in terms of how everything is coming together in Midtown.  The thing that strikes me in terms of what’s changed in the time I’ve been there is just how cooperative everyone is now. We are working hand in glove with Wayne State.  We feel like we are in it together and that’s why the Live Midtown, Buy Detroit, The Hire Detroit, and the Crime and Safety programs are working. 

DO: You used to live on the East Side of Detroit, in my neighborhood, but you bought a house in Hamtramck.  Why Hamtramck?

Hamtramck is the most walkable city in Michigan- and has the densest population.  Which is pretty amazing because it is half the population it once was.  Walkability was a huge part of why I wanted to live there.  I can walk to a grocery store, bakery, record store, party store, coffee shop, post office, bars, restaurants, churches, a library, and parks.  I also liked Hamtramck because of the housing stock.  There aren’t many places in Detroit where you can buy a modest home in a modest, stable neighborhood.  Plus, you can’t beat the location.  It is right smack dab in the middle of the city.  It is so easy to get to downtown and Midtown.  It is great for getting to northern suburbs and the western suburbs. And Hamtramck is really diverse.  Given how much diversity there is, how walkable it is, and how well everyone gets along, it is a little known success story in a lot of ways.

DO: I just read somewhere that Hamtramck is Michigan’s most internationally diverse city – is that true? 

Yes, it is pretty fascinating.  The community feels welcoming to outsiders and it doesn’t feel threatened by newcomers. I really think diversity begets diversity. It has a lot to do with the fabric of the neighborhood.  It lends itself to entrepreneurship. A lot of people who come over here open their own shops. You see the diversity with the Bengali stores and the Bosnian commerce. It has created something that is self sustaining, and people are attracted to that. 

There is definitely a legacy from the Polish community.  The Polish roots have endured – even though Polish people have moved away, their institutions, bakeries, and grocery stores have remained in the city, which keeps the Polish flavor.

DO: Are you involved in the community?

Yes, I’m trying.  One project I’ve been working on is trying to get historical designation for an old grandstand—Hamtramck Stadium.  It’s one of the last remaining sites in the country that hosted home games for the Negro Leagues. The Detroit Stars played there for several years.  It was used for high school games later on but it has been lying fallow for over 10 years and is overgrown.  The grandstand is fenced in, but it is structurally sound and it could be pretty easily restored.  What we’d like to see is a little investment through grants etc. to bring it back to being the kind of place that could host big events, youth games and be a part of chain of parks for the city.  Hamtramck has a great baseball tradition, and I really want to help bring that back.  Two teams from Hamtramck won worldwide Little League World Series championships back in the 50’s and 60’s.

Two years ago I started coaching a Hamtramck youth team.  Ultimately, I’d love to see our guys out there playing on that historic field.  Our teams have had some really great kids who come from a lot of different backgrounds.  It has been really rewarding for me to help introduce baseball to a lot of kids that really didn’t have much background with it at all, and to watch as them embrace the game. 

DO: Living in Hamtramck, do you consider yourself a Detroiter?

I definitely do.  For everyone who is from here, Hamtramck and Highland Park are part of Detroit. The communities have similar issues to Detroit– including a lot of the same financial issues.  It gets lumped in with Detroit with a lot of the same problems so it should be considered ‘authentically Detroit’. There’s really an integrated culture with Detroit. 

DO: Random question – I ran into you at Eastern Market over the winter and you were on a mission to buy 75 lbs of potatoes – what were you doing with 75 lbs of potatoes?

Yeah.  I probably wasn’t totally forthcoming with what I was buying the potatoes for.  It was for a duck blood soup.  It’s a German family tradition – my family makes it once a year and it is an all-day production.  The potatoes are for the dumplings in the soup.  Basically it is a sour vinegar broth with duck blood in it, duck meat, the dumplings, and some other vegetables.  The blood makes the broth black, so it is called black sour soup, or schwarzsauer in German. 

DO: Hmmm…as a vegetarian, that doesn’t sound too appealing.

Yeah, well, all the people who have married into the family won’t touch it.  They won’t even be in the house when we are making it.  But I love it – it is a great winter meal.

DO: Now, for some rapid fire questions. What’s your favorite bar?

Whiskey in the Jar in Hamtramck

DO: Best Bengali restaurant?

I think ZamZam is the best.

DO: If someone had 24 hours in Detroit, where would you tell them to go?

I would tell them to go on a historic church tour. There are so many beautiful churches here.

DO: Favorite thing about living in the D/Hamtramck?

It makes you tough.

A VERY DETROIT BREAKFAST CLUB

Bradford Frost and I met over breakfast at the White Grove, a Detroit diner that has been operating continuously since 1950 in the lower Cass Corridor. It was a cloudless Friday morning, and we were both perfectly out of place—and perfectly at home—for our meal. Interview has been condensed.

Tell me about the best breakfast you’ve ever had in Detroit.

So the best breakfast I ever had in Detroit was the day I proposed to my wife. We rode bikes from the Park Shelton downtown to the Breakfast House (now, Hudson’s Café). We ate omelets and drank mimosas outside. The meal was part of a whole funky day of Detroit stuff. It was bright and sunny—the first day of fall—and it kicked off a pretty special day for me.

Was that the best breakfast of your life?

No. The best breakfast of my life was in a place called Kalk Bay, South Africa, on our honeymoon. It was so good that we went twice. It’s a little nook restaurant with outdoor seating on Cape Town’s False Bay—we had an amazing, I mean, amazing champagne breakfast.

Sorry Detroit!

Did you choose Detroit or did Detroit choose you?

I chose Detroit. And then, I think Detroit chose me. It’s a town that has that effect on people.

The story goes that when I was appointed one of the 10 national United Way of America Community Fellows in 2005, they give me a list of 10 cities, including Honolulu, Chicago, Seattle, Boston and Detroit.  I put Detroit as number one on my list. I really wanted to understand how the community development sector operated in a town that had such a rough reputation, especially given Detroit’s significant social justice challenges.

The ironic thing is that my decision was influenced by the few months I lived in Honolulu while in AmeriCorps, doing a hunger survey for the Hawaii Food Bank.  That experience really illuminated to me how the brand of any place is always more dynamic and more complex than first meets the eye. In “paradise,” struggling families pay $6 for a gallon of milk, and that was in 2001. This just goes to show how we put blinders on in a lot of situations, and that, when you take them off, you discover all kinds of things. Detroit is more like that than any other place I’ve ever been.

I chose to live downtown my first year, and really just fell in love with the city—its history, its people, and the fact that it felt like this big secret. Truthfully, everyone I met all around the country was baffled that I would choose to be here. That has subsided a lot over the last 7 years.  But, on some level this reaction gives you a sense of pride, and on another level, it helps you to ask really important questions about why you choose to be anywhere.

I’ve found that Detroit is a very welcoming and supportive community if you are present, active and engaged. The initial take a lot of locals have toward newcomers is reasonable suspicion about the authenticity of your commitment. In this town, trust and confidence is something you earn, not just by proclaiming your love for Detroit or simply by being here. It’s not sufficient to just be here, you have to be present in Detroit.

When you chose Detroit, what about your wife, Dana?

Detroit is a really important part to our love story.

Dana and I, we’d been together off and on in college, and then my whole first year in Detroit we were up and down as well. She visited the city at least four or five times, and she went through a similar discovery process of Detroit, even if it was more discovery by proxy.

One night, I called Dana, and for the first time, I told her I loved her—and she moved to Detroit 7 days later. She makes no pretense that she moved to Detroit for a boy. Dana and I figured out we had our own little Catch-22—I wouldn’t commit all the way unless she opened all the way up, and she wouldn’t open all the way up unless I committed. She called my bluff and, after 2 years, I committed and she came all in.

Detroit is a town that affords us a lot—certainly one of the greatest things is the ability to be passionate about the place we live. What is interesting is that our little conundrum as a couple is the same that people have with Detroit—you have to love it for it to love you back.

How do you navigate being connected to Detroit versus being connected to larger ideas and the wider world that is not focused on, or even necessarily present, in Detroit?

This is a really intriguing dynamic. Detroit can be almost cosmopolitan within itself, but maybe not in the way most people understand that word. This is partially why we all fall in love with Detroit—it’s funky, and you discover crazy places like this diner—all the time.

In all honesty, I left Detroit to study international development, but I left here pretty sure I was going to come back. I went away to study and understand the global point of view, the international perspective, on how communities emerge and develop in ways that promote social justice. I think the challenges in Detroit merit global attention, but I sense we’re often defensive about being a great American city, which limits our receptiveness to learning from the lessons and experiences of a lot of other places all around the world.

One of the biggest things in Detroit is just seeing how the place responds, over time, to outsiders like me; people who grew up in other towns but feel genuinely passionate about joining in to revitalize the city. I fully recognize the importance of the old along with the new, the funky along with the cosmopolitan—I truly believe all that stuff enriches all of us who choose to live here. This is a crucial part of Detroit’s future. Detroit pride is real and it will always be a part of this place. I want to share in that and be able to keep a global perspective too.

What are you doing right now to stay out of the grips of complacency? Or how have you become complacent with Detroit?

The hardest thing is what you come to accept as “normal” over time. Any time I leave this place for more than a couple of weeks, I come back gripped with tension about the injustices I see— the abandonment and the blight in some communities—and the scale of the challenges all around us in Detroit.

The other thing that happens is that the longer you’re here, the more open minded you become to exploring the city’s nooks and crannies. So, what is taken as ‘normal’ in a place that frankly needs changing is an important issue.

Detroit doesn’t need different people; it needs a different scale of quality infrastructure, quality education, quality access to opportunity. It deserves to be safe and clean and vibrant and all of that stuff that is very natural in most communities.

Complacency is not in my DNA. I always have a sense of yearning for more. You can feel Detroit yearning too.

There is an interesting subculture of people here: from 16-80 years old in this town, some people who’ve been here forever to others that just arrived, there’s this pocket, this nucleus of frenetic energy. There’s also a fatigue in this network. Doing this work is unique to Detroit, because the barriers to being involved here are so low. What I think we need is a way to build bridges across networks in the community that have scars from trying to do this in the past, or reservations about the new guard of people. I don’t know how to do that, but I think it is important to not loose site of the fact that these relationships do need to be built.

Who were you in high school? If you were a character in the movie, “The Breakfast Club, who would you be?

(After conferring with his wife, Brad reports back: “My wife tells me that I am unquestionably Molly Ringwald’s character.”)

By the end of high school, I was really yearning for something different—for things that would be really meaningful and worthwhile.

In a lot of ways I am still the same person I was in high-school—just a preppy guy that likes to connect and have fun—but hopefully my friends and peers from back then would say, ‘he’s learned a lot, he’s more compelling now.’

In this issue of the Green Office Infusion, we provide tips on how to reduce single-occupancy vehicle commute trips for you and your organization.  Supporting alternate modes of transportation promotes a healthy lifestyle, saves money, and is good for the environment.

You can take action right now! May is bike to work month, May 14 – 18 is bike to work week, and May 18th is bike to work day.  So hop on your bike, get your colleagues to join you, and leave those cars at home!

The idea is simple: with our 29 positions in 25 organizations throughout the city, we want to use our influence and collective impact to create more environmentally-friendly work environments.

We also hope that the information we gather and share will be useful for anyone interested in individual or organizational change.

Join us!