Metropolitan Impact

Growing the farming movement in Detroit

stuxbury — Mon, 06 Nov 2023 20:46:42 +0000

Growing the farming movement in Detroit stuxbury Mon, 11/06/2023 - 15:46

When thinking of farming, many people may imagine broad fields of crops with grazing animals, well away from the concrete jungle of major cities. But over the last few decades, local food security, sustainability concerns and neighborhood green space movements have created an enthusiasm for urban agriculture, growing food within the smaller areas available within city limits, including vacant lots, gardens and balconies.

Tepfirah "Tee" Rushdan is helping push these movements forward. The urban and regional studies major holds leadership roles in three local farming- and food justice-focused nonprofits and was recently appointed the City of Detroit's first director of urban agriculture, a sign of the growing importance of these efforts to the city's vitality. Appointed to the role this fall, Rushdan will help shape city policy regarding urban farming and serve as a liaison to the urban farming community.

The value of a government position for urban agriculture, Rushdan says, comes from the unique nature of the practice. "Farming in a city is totally different than farming in a rural area," she says. "And farmers are left to navigate complicated city functions that are, frankly, not necessarily meant for farmers."

Rushdan, a Detroit resident, says she first came to gardening both through a desire to beautify her neighborhood, while also achieving a degree of self-reliance by growing her own food. The blackout of 2003, in which 50 million people across large parts of the U.S., including Detroit, lost power for several days, gave Rushdan a new sense of how the systems we rely on can break down. "I didn't grow up with a green thumb or anything like that," she says. "I got to a point in my conscious awareness that I understood that the way that food comes to our table is vulnerable. As far as food goes, nothing is produced right inside the city.”

Being a "young and slightly revolutionary minded" person at the time, Rushdan decided to act. "I thought I was really doing something to counter the negative impacts of systemic racism and things like that. But then that blackout really showed me that I was doing nothing but talking," she recalls. "That was an awakening point for me where I was like, I want to participate in my own food." Rushdan says her first attempt at gardening – planting some carrot seeds in her backyard – was "horrible." But, she adds, “I was learning.”

Eventually, Rushdan started a community garden on her block, and she also began participating in other beautification projects for a neighborhood that had been hit hard by the housing crisis. "We were just trying to make the neighborhood look good for our family and for the children on the block,” she says. “And I also was on this sufficiency kick."

From there, Rushdan took on a farming apprenticeship and began her professional career in farming and agriculture advocacy. Referencing the Drake song "Started from the Bottom," she explains that she eventually rose to the role of director at Greening of Detroit – a nonprofit focused on tree planting and job training across the city – before founding the Detroit Black Farmer Land Fund and serving as co-chair of Black to the Land Coalition, positions she continues to hold. She also assumed the position of co-director of Keep Growing Detroit, another nonprofit focused on local food sovereignty, which had her meeting and interacting with key figures in Detroit, and taught her how to navigate the city bureaucracy.

Rushdan's path to becoming Detroit's first director of urban agriculture arose directly from this advocacy. She says that Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan's Land Value Tax Plan, unveiled at the Mackinac Policy Conference in May 2023, held a number of implications for farmers she felt were not being taken into consideration. Rushdan arranged private meetings with the mayor and his staff to craft an exemption for farmers, as well as addressing questions about water and land access. "I said, ‘A lot of cities – Philly, New York – have installed directors of urban agriculture," Rushdan explains. "’Let's get somebody in the city that's focused on that.’ I didn't know it was going to be me."

Rushdan was also surprised at how quickly the mayor acted. "I'm thinking this is something that he would think about down the road," she says. "And then a couple of weeks later, I got a call from the mayor's office. 'Would you be interested?'"

Rushdan says the knowledge she’s gaining through the Urban and Regional Studies programs will help support her work in Detroit. "It's great to have professors to talk to about current issues," she says, noting that she’s “not a traditional policy person." "It's great to have people there to kind of talk things out — how is this supposed to go? how can this be helpful?"

Rushdan says a city like Detroit requires a concerted effort to repurpose vacant land, including working with community members who are already engaged in reclamation efforts. And she’s proud to live in a city that’s created a position to lead these efforts. "We should be figuring out how to iron out the system to make it easier and also figure out what support we can provide these projects,” she says.

Article by Shaun Manning

Sustainability

College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters

Metropolitan Impact

Off

Mon, 11/06/2023 - 20:45

��-Dearborn student Tepfirah "Tee" Rushdan, Detroit's first director of urban agriculture, is working to grow community efforts toward food sustainability.

��-Dearborn student Tepfirah "Tee" Rushdan is the City of Detroit's first director of urban agriculture.

An update from the Office of Metropolitan Impact

lblouin — Wed, 29 Mar 2023 13:30:06 +0000

An update from the Office of Metropolitan Impact lblouin Wed, 03/29/2023 - 09:30

In November 2023, ��-Dearborn officially purchased a three-year subscription to Collaboratory, a publicly accessible database created by higher education institutions for the purpose of tracking community engagement activities. Since then, the Office of Metropolitan Impact staff have had their noses to the grindstone preparing bulk data uploads for the system, including the 700-plus nonprofit, government and corporate partnerships OMI has built and nurtured over the past 12 years.

What is Collaboratory?

Collaboratory software enables users to understand an institution’s engagement activities from several vantage points — that of an activity, a community partner, a course, a faculty lead and more. This system does more than the one-to-one matching you’d expect from a typical CRM tool — it is truly three-dimensional.

In alignment with national best practices of community engagement, Collaboratory is a publicly searchable database, putting transparency and accountability to our greater community at the forefront.

How will Collaboratory serve faculty?

Collaboratory will create a community of practice, revolutionizing engaged projects, coursework and research. By simply searching a topic or an organization, faculty will be able to see across the entire campus the existing experts and activities relevant to the search. The ease of this search process will encourage interdisciplinary collaboration and empower faculty to take on engaged projects. We also hope this system will highlight and uplift the amazing faculty that already work deeply with the community!

How will Collaboratory serve the University?

The database will allow the university to track progress on key initiatives, like Project-Based Learning and Urban Futures. When Collaboratory is fully onboarded, it will illustrate ��-Dearborn’s engagement story and inform institutional strategy. This data will be vital as ��-Dearborn prepares to reapply for the Carnegie Engaged Campus Classification in 2026, a charge led by OMI and Student Affairs.

What to expect

Over the next few semesters, OMI will be populating the system with engagement “activities” — coursework, research, projects or initiatives. You may receive an invitation to sit for a 15-minute interview about the breadth of your work with external partners so OMI can enter activities on your behalf. Then, you’ll receive an email asking you to “approve” the engaged activities you take the lead on. While we will initially focus on research, course-based and engaged project activities led by faculty, ultimately we plan to track engaged activities by staff and students as well.

OMI’s graduate social work student intern, Breanna Rivera-Kloeppel, created a terrific Faculty Guide to Collaboratory that helps to further acclimate faculty to the system. On behalf of the Office of Metropolitan Impact, we are so excited to share this new tool with you!

Research

Metropolitan Impact

Off

Wed, 03/29/2023 - 13:29

Learn about ��-Dearborn's subscription to Collaboratory, a tool for tracking community engagement activities.

Power in community: Nearly 500 volunteers participate in 23rd Annual MLK Day of Service

rudmehta — Sat, 28 Jan 2023 18:10:35 +0000

Power in community: Nearly 500 volunteers participate in 23rd Annual MLK Day of Service rudmehta Sat, 01/28/2023 - 13:10

Nearly 500 volunteers braved the frigid temperatures this morning to participate in University of Michigan-Dearborn’s 23rd Annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service. The event, a partnership between ��-Dearborn and Henry Ford College, brought together students, staff, alumni and faculty of both schools for a morning of work throughout Metro Detroit.

Chancellor Daniel Little welcomed volunteers to campus before they embarked on their service activities.

“This is my 16th Martin Luther King Day of Service. And it fills my heart with pride every time I see young people… give a day of service to contribute to the betterment of our region, and to say with your time, with your effort, with your energy, ‘We care about the progress of our region,’” he said. “There is power in community, and that power is expressed today in the service you are rendering.”

Participants volunteered for more than 20 organizations, including ACCESS, Blight Busters, Forgotten Harvest, Franklin Wright Settlements, Gleaners Community Food Bank and Urban Neighborhood Initiatives.

��-Dearborn will host events throughout the week to celebrate King’s legacy:

Tuesday, January 19

What is Your Dream?
- All Day, Chalk Wall, McKinley Cafe
Film Screening: Reflections Unheard: Black Women in Civil Rights
- Noon, Kochoff Hall A, University Center
Conversation on Race with New Detroit: The Power and Influence of Millennials
- 3 p.m., Kochoff Hall, University Center

Wednesday, January 20

Soup and Conversation: Has His Dream Been Achieved?
- Noon, Kochoff Hall C, University Center

Thursday, January 21

Alumni Panel, Faculty and Staff Enrichment Program: ��-Dearborn’s Diverse Student Experiences and How Those Experiences Can Inform Our Work
- Noon, Room 1225, University Center
Stage Play and Discussion: The Meeting
- 5 p.m., Kochoff Hall, University Center

Friday, January 22

Second Annual Engagement Day
- 8:30 a.m., Kochoff Hall, University Center
Stage Play and Discussion: The Meeting
- 7 p.m., Kochoff Hall, University Center

Metropolitan Impact

Off

Mon, 01/18/2016 - 06:00

Nearly 500 volunteers participated in the university's 23rd Annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service.

Robert Bosch North America, ��-Dearborn partner for innovation event

rudmehta — Sat, 07 Jan 2023 16:20:21 +0000

Robert Bosch North America, ��-Dearborn partner for innovation event rudmehta Sat, 01/07/2023 - 11:20

Focused around the theme of smart technologies in everyday life—like the home, car and workplace—Robert Bosch North America (RBNA) employees and University of Michigan-Dearborn students moved excitedly around the tables, sipping coffee and sharing ideas.

They were equipped with computer hardware, sensors, motors, building materials, boards, sticky notes, pens, microphones. And, most importantly, ingenuity.

College of Business and College of Engineering and Computer Science students were invited to join the multinational engineering and electronics company’s RBNA Hackathon, which took place this summer. The hackathon is a way for Bosch employees to engage in creation of novel ideas and collaborate in development of minimally viable prototypes.

Prior to the hackathon, a series of mini events were held for Bosch associates and students to prepare. Events included workshops focused on creativity, collaboration, business models and public speaking, a technical training series, and a weekly question and answer session via Skype.

RBNA Director of Business Development Estella Woo and Manager of Corporate Strategy Preetinder Gill said this was the first time Bosch associates joined forces with students from ��-Dearborn for the hackathon. The event drew 85 people, including 25 ��-Dearborn students and about 60 Bosch associates across 10 business areas.

“Diversity of thought generates better ideas and it gives the teams a more rounded perspective,” Woo said.

��-Dearborn students were invited after Gill reached out to iLabs Director Tim Davis at the urging of Bosch intern Breann Guerin. Guerin, a digital marketing major, had taken Davis’ Entrepreneurial Thinking course.

Davis had hoped 10 students would participate, since it was summer. But the response was almost overwhelming as 25 students signed up within a week. The students were undergraduate and graduate from various majors across campus.

“They understood what a fantastic opportunity this is,” said Davis, who noted the administrative offices of College of Business, College of Engineering and Computer Science, and the Talent Gateway reached out to students. “Not only are they given tools to code and create. Each student was also paired with a group of Bosch employees. So, for our students, there was mentoring and networking too.”

Above, ��-Dearborn students who partnered with Bosch employees to come up with the idea “iSee Tomorrow,” received the Award of Excellence for Outstanding Commitment to Drive Innovation.

Hearing about this opportunity through the Talent Gateway, Likith Manjegowda said he saw working with employees at the largest automotive supplier in the world as a learning experience on creating well-developed projects.

“I really wanted to put my ideas into practice, and the Bosch Hackathon was the right platform to start off and bring my ideas to reality,” said Manjegowda, who is studying mechanical engineering. “I now understand what needs to be addressed to convert an idea into a product.”

Manjegowda’s group—made of three Bosch associates and two ��-Dearborn students—came up with the idea “iSee Tomorrow,” a smart cane device that uses infrastructure sensors to help the seeing-impaired maneuver through cities.

For their idea and presentation, the team received the Award of Excellence for Outstanding Commitment to Drive Innovation.

Gill said he was very impressed with both the focus on innovation and the ideas of the ��-Dearborn students.

“Some of the best students come from the University of Michigan. This hackathon has only reinforced this,” Gill said. “Their ideas are fresh and relevant. We are happy to have them here.”

Students shared how grateful they were for the knowledge that Bosch associates shared with them. Manjegowda said it went beyond the coding or business models they had learned.

“What I learned at Bosch will help me create viable solutions for people who need the aid of technology to lead a better life,” Manjegowda said.

Experiential Learning

College of Business

COB Student Organizations

College of Engineering and Computer Science

Metropolitan Impact

Off

Mon, 09/11/2017 - 05:00

The RBNA Hackathon challenged employees and students to collaborate around the theme of smart technologies in everyday life.

Detroit Public Schools, CEHHS partner to revive elementary library

rudmehta — Sat, 07 Jan 2023 16:08:19 +0000

Detroit Public Schools, CEHHS partner to revive elementary library rudmehta Sat, 01/07/2023 - 11:08

Where there were once empty bookcases against the wall, there are now thousands of reading materials for children to peruse and choose.

Beginning this school year, Bennett Elementary School Library—which had been closed for more than a decade—is filled with children sitting on rugs and at tables, flipping through the pages of their selected books.

J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter. Gary Soto’s Too Many Tamales. Eloise Greenfield’s Grandpa’s Face. And Beverly Cleary’s Henry Huggins, a personal favorite of Paul Bielich, College of Education, Health, and Human Services (CEHHS) instructional learning manager.

“When I was young, that book inspired me to love reading. That made a major impact on my life,” Bielich said. “It is so important for children to have access to books. If they have no books, how can they develop a love for reading?”

Bielich said the lack of a proper library was brought to the university’s attention by members of the Detroit-based nonprofit Southwest Solutions, a ��-Dearborn community partner in the school’s neighborhood. And a group of CEHHS educators collaborated with Kaity Nicarsti, Southwest Solutions Community Schools site coordinator.

Reading, Language Arts and English as a Second Language Associate Professor Martha Adler, Reading and Language Arts Associate Professor Danielle DeFauw and Bielich helped to reinvigorate the space at Bennett, a learning environment for more than 500 pre-kindergarten to fifth grade students.

For more than a year, CEHHS worked with Detroit Public Schools employees to put a reading space back into the building. The project received a nearly $4,500 grant from the Office of Metropolitan Impact and in-kind support from several publishers, with Scholastic giving the largest donation.

“There is a joy that you can feel now that it is open again and I’m glad I can share in that,” Bielich said. “I was born and raised in Detroit. I went through city schools. I worked as a DPS librarian for 36 years. It is in my heart.”

Even with the library open, there still is work to do. Bielich is currently creating a circulation system for the children to check the books out. To help with this, approximately 20 ��-Dearborn students, who are members of Books for a Benefit, come to the library weekly to inventory books in need of cataloging.

The team feels the most important aspect of this work will go beyond the bookshelf. Research shows that children with regular access to a library perform better in school as a whole.

Results from dozens of large-scale studies—involving over 8,700 schools and over 2.6 million students— have consistently demonstrated that students score an average of 10 to 20 percent higher on reading and achievement tests when their school has a strong library media program, according to an August 2013 School Library Impact Studies Research Summary. And this effect holds regardless of other school conditions such as student-teacher ratio, overall per-pupil spending, student demographics and community socio-economic conditions.

“Studies have shown that student achievement rises when there are these resources for students, libraries in particular,” he said. “A book can take you anywhere.”

College of Education, Health, and Human Services

Education

Metropolitan Impact

Off

Mon, 10/09/2017 - 05:00

Bennett Elementary School Library—which had been closed for more than a decade—now includes thousands of reading materials thanks to the partnership.

Students take away new perspectives during a week of service

rudmehta — Wed, 14 Dec 2022 18:06:25 +0000

Students take away new perspectives during a week of service rudmehta Wed, 12/14/2022 - 13:06

Many of the students who pitched in during this year’s Alternative Spring Break and Solar Spring Break programs are no strangers to giving back. But several students said that with schedules packed full of classes, side jobs, and family obligations, it’s often hard to find time to regularly volunteer. The solid week of service not only felt like a much-needed chance to lend a hand. Many said it helped renew their motivation for doing so year round. Here’s a look at what ��-Dearborn students accomplished at sites in Cleveland, San Diego and right here on campus.

Cleveland

��-Dearborn’s Opportunity Scholars take the first part of their program’s name to heart.

“Our mindset is basically that if you’re given an opportunity to a make a difference, you take it,” said sophomore Jalen Rose. You certainly saw that spirit on display during the recent Alternative Spring Break trip to Cleveland, where Rose and a group of his fellow OpScholars powered through a packed itinerary of service with seven different community organizations in just six days.

Both Rose and his fellow Cleveland site leader, sophomore Karina Nava, said one of the most meaningful experiences came at the front end of the week. The Monday trip into a rapidly changing Cleveland neighborhood left the team with an up-close look at the complexities of gentrification—and a new lense on how that’s impacting Detroit.

“If we think about Detroit, we want it to grow, and for that you need new people and businesses to come in,” Nava said. “But you also have to be careful with home pricing and the opportunities that are available for the people who have been here forever. They are the people who have created, over time, the culture of the city. So you can’t just relocate everyone, or you’ll lose that culture. Finding the middle ground is what makes the challenge so difficult.”

Later in the week, students pitched in packing lunches at a local food pantry, lent a hand with Habitat for Humanity and helped out at a Cleveland book bank. But it was a visit to a community center dedicated to helping immigrants and refugees that left the biggest mark on freshman Amanda Saleh.

“They had so many kinds of programs, from helping out single mothers to teaching people English,” Saleh said. “You see how hard it is for someone to leave their home and become an American citizen. It’s not as easy as some people think it is.”

San Diego

Students from University of Michigan have traveled to San Diego to do solar installations in lower-income communities for the past five spring breaks. But 2018 was a year of milestones for their partnership with the nonprofit GRID Alternatives and the “Solar Spring Break” program.

For starters, it was the first year that ��-Dearborn students made the trip alongside their Ann Arbor counterparts. In fact, Alexis Thompson and Christian Cannon, both juniors in ��-Dearborn’s mechanical engineering department, served as team leaders for the trip—overseeing everything from fundraising to personally cooking meals for their team of 25 volunteers at the end of their long work days.

Thompson said they initially set a goal of raising $10,000 to support a single solar installation in their target service area—a La Jolla tribal community northeast of San Diego. In the end, the group blew through that target, raising more than $25,000—a record number for a U-M Solar Spring Break team. That allowed them to complete three solar arrays in less than a week.

“The cultural aspect was also pretty incredible,” she said. “We had a lot of conversations, and members of the community talked about how hard it was for their students to get into universities, or about the increase in crime and abuse rates. And those are some of the very same issues facing households in Detroit. So I was able to make connections with people from a totally different background in a totally different part of the country.”

Cannon said the group already is planning its next renewable energy-focused service trips, including a return trip to the La Jolla reservation next year and a project in Tijuana. The trip to Mexico will mark yet another milestone: It will make the U-M team the first Solar Spring Break group to take their volunteerism outside the U.S.

Dearborn

Students who were staying closer to home for the break didn’t miss out on the week of giving back. A third team of about a dozen students participated in three days of hands-on activities on campus.

On the first day, that included making blankets for area homeless shelters, which gave graduate student Priyal Sheth a rare chance to connect with students from other parts of the university.

“I’m in engineering, so I only get to work with other engineers,” Sheth said. “But on our team we had a biology major, somebody from the College of Business, and two people who just transferred from other schools. One of us was from South Africa, one from El Salvador, another from South America, another from the Middle East—and I’m from India. You’re sitting there for a few hours, too, so it’s a chance to hear a lot of different perspectives. By the end of the day, you feel like old friends.”

Later in the week, students wrote cards to kids in local hospitals and organized ��-Dearborn’s Student Food Pantry.

Master’s student Raquel Estrada, who was participating in ASB for the second time, said the turnout for the local events left her energized.

“I thought there weren’t going to be that many people showing up because it was spring break,” she said. “But for every activity, there were at least five or six people coming in and out per hour. So it shows you we can make a difference anywhere, from campus or outside. Either way, it’s really powerful.”

Volunteer or Community Service

Metropolitan Impact

Student Life

Off

Mon, 03/19/2018 - 05:00

More than two dozen students participated in Alternative Spring Break and Solar Spring Break programs at home and across the country.

Building a ‘culture of health’ for all Dearborn residents

rudmehta — Wed, 14 Dec 2022 17:23:21 +0000

Building a ‘culture of health’ for all Dearborn residents rudmehta Wed, 12/14/2022 - 12:23

Healthy Dearborn—a community coalition anchored by Beaumont Health, the City of Dearborn and Dearborn Public Schools—may only be a few years old. But its 500-plus members already have racked up an impressive list of victories—including a new bike share project, multiple community fitness programs, improvements to the local farmers market and a robust research team that’s providing data-driven insight into the health needs of Dearborn residents.

The goal is to build a holistic “culture of the health” in the city by improving access to healthy foods and supporting active lifestyles. But as Healthy Dearborn forges ahead, steering committee member and ��-Dearborn Sociology Professor Carmel Price said there’s a renewed emphasis on ensuring the coalition’s work is addressing health priorities for all—and not just some—of Dearborn’s residents.

“The challenge we recognized is that the people who are shaping the conversations are often those who already have more resources,” Price said. “But what about the parts of the city where there are higher rates of chronic conditions? Do they have representation in the Healthy Dearborn coalition? Are they included in the conversations that shape policy and programs? We didn’t want all this great work we’re doing to reinforce the inequities that exist.”

While health disparities have always been part of the Healthy Dearborn mission, Price said it’s become a higher priority since the release of new health data from the Centers for Disease Control. The CDC’s 500 Cities project, detailing chronic disease risk factors and health outcomes in America’s 500 largest cities, painted a picture of a heterogeneous community, where some neighborhoods had far different health outcomes than others. Among the major storylines revealed in the data: Residents in east and south side neighborhoods, which border some of the heaviest industry in metro Detroit, had higher rates of asthma and COPD than their west side neighbors.

New health data from the Centers for Disease Control shows residents in east and south side neighborhoods had higher rates of asthma and COPD than their west side neighbors.

“When we typically think about healthy living, we think about exercising more or eating better,” Price said. “But when we held some community forums on the south side, the resounding message from residents was that their biggest need was air quality—and the fact they didn’t feel comfortable being active outside because of air quality. So it was a much different set of challenges that require a different kind of work than the coalition had done so far.”

Price’s good friend and ��-Dearborn colleague Natalie Sampson has been crucial in that work on the south side of the city. The assistant professor of public health and veteran of air quality campaigns in neighboring Detroit also has enlisted students in one of her public health courses to help facilitate community forums. Sampson said some students, like Karima Alwisha, a south Dearborn resident and public health major, have emerged as strong community leaders.

That work has inspired what Sampson calls “a separate but closely related” new initiative called Environmental Health Research to Action (EHRA). Through EHRA, Sampson, her students, Price, and key community leaders and partners are undertaking several new projects around air pollution, including building an air quality report for the city and launching a summer youth academy.

“The idea is to not just get youth to understand air quality issues—they live there, they know all about that,” Sampson said. “But we can help train them in the science, the epidemiology, how to do air monitoring—and how you can then take that and create a policy advocacy strategy.”

This semester, students in Sampson’s Community Organizing for Health course also worked on so-called “shared use policies.”

“Given that there’s interest in physical activity, but people can’t always be active outside, Healthy Dearborn is trying to make sure people have access to indoor public spaces, like high school gyms, after hours, for exercise,” Sampson said. “So students are researching existing resources and policies and what other communities have done to see if this makes sense for Dearborn.”

Sampson and Price said creative solutions like these are indicative of the contributions the ��-Dearborn community is making in the push to make the city a healthier place. In all, more than 50 faculty, staff and students have lent their effort and expertise to various Healthy Dearborn coalition projects.

“Our students are a critical piece of getting this work done,” Price said. “The coalition members are developing strategic plans and action plans, but when it comes to implementation, we’ve really relied on students to make these ideas a reality. And our researchers—here and at Wayne State and elsewhere—are writing grants, doing data collection, and providing all kinds of expertise. So it’s incredibly exciting to see us building momentum.”

Experiential Learning

College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters

Behavioral Sciences

College of Education, Health, and Human Services

Health and Human Services

Metropolitan Impact

Off

Mon, 04/23/2018 - 05:00

��-Dearborn faculty, staff and students are helping the Healthy Dearborn coalition take on its biggest challenge yet: tackling the city’s health disparities.

Children play in the shadow of heavy industry in a south Dearborn neighborhood. Photo courtesy of Healthy Dearborn.

Annual event highlights partnerships between U-M and Detroit

rudmehta — Wed, 30 Nov 2022 18:35:49 +0000

Annual event highlights partnerships between U-M and Detroit rudmehta Wed, 11/30/2022 - 13:35

At um3detroit, Rep. Brenda Lawrence (D-14) said Detroit has a reputation of strength; a fighting spirit that will only get stronger with education, investment and commitment.

Tonya Allen, Skillman Foundation president and CEO, said it’s important for an “Our Detroit” framework to be adopted for the city to succeed as an equitable, just and prosperous place.

And Barbara McQuade, former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, said Detroit has turned a corner and she feels the positive momentum.

“I don’t like to use the phrase ‘Detroit’s coming back’ because it suggests this backward looking thing of nostalgia and the good old days. And, frankly, the good old days weren’t so good for everyone,” McQuade said. “Instead, think of it as a future Detroit. A Detroit that’s creating something new—an inclusive place for everybody [that] has opportunities for everybody.”

The three speakers addressed more than 300 campus and community leaders who attended um3detroit Thursday, May 3. The event—now in its second year and held at ��-Dearborn for the first time—was designed to encourage discussion on how all three University of Michigan campuses can strengthen research, learning and collaboration opportunities with Detroit neighborhoods, businesses and organizations. Participants have the opportunity to share their research and ideas, network and make connections for future work.

“There are so many who have an interest, both an academic interest and a practical interest, in being part of the progress of metropolitan Detroit,” said Chancellor Daniel Little. “To bring this group of activists, researchers and engaged scholars to the ��-Dearborn campus for this event—this catalyst for change—is an honor and a privilege."

The event included poster presentations, panel discussions about topics like supporting Detroit community-based organizations and the higher education challenges of first-generation and non-traditional students, and lightening talks—which were seven-minute faculty research presentations.

The lighting talks included topics like flooding as a public health and social justice issue, teaching math to students at underperforming schools, the importance of partnerships for early childhood education, finding funding for collaborative projects and more.

��-Dearborn faculty members Lara Rusch and Francine Banner presented, “Holistic Justice: Detroit’s Street Outreach Court.” Banner said the specialty court—which organizes within the 36th District Court and is run by pro bono work—began more than five years ago to help marginalized people resolve minor violations, like not mowing the lawn, before fines build up. The volunteers hold court in soup kitchens.

"We are looking at this as a model not just within Detroit, but as a model for holistic justice perhaps more broadly,” said Banner, associate professor of sociology. “Unlike other court-ordered problem-solving courts, these are run on a stand-down model where clients—many homeless—are self-motivated to relieve fines and engage with the community. In exchange, clients must make a good faith effort to help themselves, like seek employment, enroll in a 12-step program, obtain a state ID card. In one case, a client needed to seek dental care.”

In closing the daylong event, U-M President Mark Schlissel said he noticed a common thread among the many ways in which U-M engages in and with Detroit.

“There is consistency on what I’ve heard today: The idea of partnership,” Schlissel said. “The key idea that keeps coming up again and again is partnership. Faculty and students working alongside community leaders and community members, recognizing and respecting that each of us has something unique and indispensible to contribute. Partnership is key when trying to work on a common set of goals for the city of Detroit.”

Events

Metropolitan Impact

Off

Mon, 05/07/2018 - 05:00

More than 300 campus and community partners strengthen connections at um3detroit.

Gardeners can score free seeds at this new seed library

rudmehta — Wed, 30 Nov 2022 18:05:33 +0000

Gardeners can score free seeds at this new seed library rudmehta Wed, 11/30/2022 - 13:05

If you haven’t visited your local library recently, you might be surprised at what all you can haul away from the checkout desk. You’ll still find all the library staples, of course, like books, movies and music. But many local branches have started lending non-media items like telescopes, camping gear and power tools. One Ann Arbor location even offers everything you’ll need for a game of Kubb—a traditional Scandinavian lawn game that’s sort of a hybrid between bowling and horseshoes.

This spring, the Dearborn Public Library’s Henry Ford Centennial branch got in on the unusual items trend with a program that offers patrons free garden seeds. Walk up toward the second floor reference desk, look to your right, and you’ll spot a simple, two-drawer wooden cabinet that houses the branch’s new “seed library.”

The idea is pretty simple: Anyone from the community can browse through the hundreds of small, yellow, hand-stuffed seed packets and take whatever they want to plant in their home gardens. It’s totally free. You don’t even have to have a library card.

The project is one of the latest from Healthy Dearborn—a community coalition that’s promoting healthy living in the greater Dearborn community. The effort has drawn the talents and volunteer hours of dozens of ��-Dearborn students, staff and faculty—including for the new seed library, an idea university volunteers and their library partners cooked up to promote access to fresh foods.

“It’s a really fun concept, but we were kind of anxious to see if people would jump in and start using it,” said Patty Podzikowski, who helps look after the seed library from her post at the reference desk. “But Dearborn has this newsletter—The Back Fence—that goes out to every single resident. And in March, right there on the front page, was a story about the seed library. When that hit people's mailboxes, our phone just blew up. And we didn’t even have it officially up and running yet.”

At that point, Podzikowski called in the rest of the seed library team, which included a small group of students and staff from ��-Dearborn and a student from Wayne State University. Within just a few days, they packaged, labeled and stocked the library with more than 100 different kinds of flower and vegetable seeds—all of which were non-GMO and non-hybrid.

That last fact is important to one of the other things the project hopes to promote: seed saving. In true library fashion, the team ideally wants seed library patrons to “borrow” the materials and then “return” them for others to use. With seeds, that will mean taking them from the library in early spring and summer; then, in the fall, gardeners will collect and return seeds from the plants they’ve grown in order to replenish the supply. This kind of seed saving is easiest to do with non-hybrid varieties, which produce seeds and plants that are the same from year to year.

“I think what makes the seed library so interesting is that, if we can get people to participate in the seed saving part of it, it’s essentially self-sustaining,” said ��-Dearborn senior Adam Khanafer. “All we need is the initial input of those seeds we distributed in year one, and from there, the participants can keep it going sort of indefinitely.”

While Khanafer said they’re still probably a few years away from that goal, the team wants to support any seed savers who want to start this season. There’s already some basic takeaway literature on seed saving right at the seed library, along with a list of titles you can check out from the Dearborn Public Library. But given the level of interest, the team is also planning some community workshops, which will not only teach more advanced seed saving techniques, but will allow the gardeners who have rallied around this project to meet each other.

In the meantime, Khanafer will be adding more fuel to the first-year fire. He said the seed library has been such a hit, the cabinet full of little yellow envelopes is already due for a mid-summer restocking.

Health and Wellness

Nature or Environment

Sustainability

Metropolitan Impact

Student Life

Off

Mon, 07/23/2018 - 05:00

��-Dearborn staff and students helped launch the pilot project that encourages healthy eating and seed saving.

Contributing to 'A River Revived'

stuxbury — Mon, 07 Nov 2022 21:32:15 +0000

Contributing to 'A River Revived' stuxbury Mon, 11/07/2022 - 16:32

The Rouge River flows side-by-side with the careers of ��-Dearborn Environmental Interpretive Center educators Dorothy McLeer and Rick Simek. And it has for nearly 30 years.

The EIC may be where they teach the public about the river and the other natural features of the land around campus. But it’s not where they were first introduced to the Rouge, which connects to the Detroit River.

Prior to arriving at ��-Dearborn, EIC Program Coordinator McLeer would spend lunch breaks from her retail job near the river in an effort to catch glimpses of wildlife — she recalls seeing trash and debris. As a teenager, Environmental Study Area Manager Simek heard negative comments about the high levels of pollution in the waterway.

“People once believed that you could wash everything away. But where exactly is away?,” McLeer asked before singing a folk song that ponders the question.

She continued, “But there isn’t an away. A popular saying 40 or 50 years ago regarding sewage waste and other pollutants was “the solution to pollution is dilution.” Well, we’ve all learned that’s not true. That thinking took this beautiful place and turned it into what was once considered one of the most degraded urban rivers in the country.”

Today, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says it is “a model for river restoration.”

The story of this dramatic environmental turn-around is told in a new edited volume, “Rouge River Revived: How People are Bringing Their River Back to Life” (University of Michigan Press, 2022). “Rouge River Revived” is edited by environmentalist scholars John H. Hartig and Jim Graham — both of whom have spoken at ��-Dearborn — with chapters written by environmentalists, community activists and others intimately involved in the day-to-day process of river restoration. McLeer and Simek were invited by Biology Professor Emeritus Orin Gelderloos, the EIC’s founding director, to join him in penning a chapter for the book reflecting on the shift in paradigm about the historical neglect and abuse of the Rouge.

Current EIC Director Claudia Walters said the book raises awareness on the river revival and needed next steps to reach long-term ecosystem health and sustainability goals. “We are very excited and honored to be part of this project to share the story of the revival of our urban-industrial river that literally caught on fire in 1969 and is now a natural resource that is celebrated and cherished.”

Simek said awareness is important at all ages. Through EIC-hosted school field trips, Simek and the EIC staff have spoken with school children (between 10,000 to 12,000 children attend EIC educational programming in any given non-COVID year) who do not realize that they have a river flowing in their town. “To get people to care about protecting and restoring it, they need to know it’s here first. And they need to know who lives in it and around it — like the turtles, the herons, the beavers and others. They begin to connect to this place in their community,” he said. “Through awareness, you can see that light go off and then the questions start. That’s why books like ‘Rouge River Revived’ and educational programming are so important.”

To help people learn more about the river running through their communities, copies of the book will be in all libraries along the Rouge River watershed. The book’s contributors are available to lead lectures and book discussions with students and community organizations.

For example, an upcoming “Rouge River Revived” virtual discussion organized by Friends of the Rouge and the EIC will take place from 7 to 8:30 p.m. Nov. 17. Book co-authors will be panelists during the online event.

Schools, libraries, community organizations, or businesses interested in scheduling a presentation on “Rouge River Revived” can contact co-editors John Hartig or Jim Graham. For schools interested in hands-on programming to learn more about the river, contact the EIC by reaching out to Rick Simek.

Funding to provide copies of the book to libraries in the watershed was provided by the Colina Foundation to the University of Michigan-Dearborn. Additional funding for presentations and lectures was provided by the Americana Foundation.

Article by Sarah Tuxbury.