During Summer 2020, seven Middle and High School students began their journey in the “MAD” (Making a Difference) Detroit Service Program, a 5-week initiative designed and led by Communities First, Inc. to immerse participants in a sustainable service project. Despite the onset challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, students practiced social distancing activities and were mindful to public health protocols in order to engage with the service project first hand. This year’s project focused on Social & Civic Engagement, Equity in Education, and creating engaging strategies that make an impact.
Reoccurring events include an Exploratory Career Speaker Series where guests shared their experiences and answered student questions about their role in their given field over Zoom. Invited guests include: Andrea Marquez, a social-justice advocate, recent M.Arch graduate from the University of Michigan, and aspiring design strategist. Simon Ko, Senior Site Reliability Engineer on the cloud platform team at Roblox, California, with a passion for astronomy and astrophysics. Liz Schondelmayer, a Communications Coordinator from College of Social Science at Michigan State University, who enjoys writing, graphic design, videography, photography, and storytelling. Marcel Pearl, a finance graduate who is a Commercial Real Estate & Community Engagement Specialist at Encore Real Estate Investment Services in Detroit, Michigan. Many speakers were able to share an example of their work to the students and provide helpful insight on resources to explore.
The students started the program learning about the Census and how it impacts the communities in which they live. Eager to ensure that their community didn’t lose funding, they began working on creating videos and informational pieces to inform others about what the Census is and how it impacts funding for necessary resources such as schools and roads. (Embed link to videos and ads)
The rising High School Juniors working on this project, Auriel, DaJhai, Kamryn, Karina, Makaylynn, and Mariah, and the rising 8th Grader Ethan, performed research and through personal experience they came to find an overarching theme of their distaste and poor quality of school lunches and decided to interrogate the topic further using other media. While learning about different media strategies, they referenced the book You Are Mighty written by Caroline Paul.
Other activities include morning ice breakers where students engaged in quick critical-thinking and team-building exercises. In order to practice safe distancing during activities, students talk about the end goal of the project, divided up the work, assembled individually and then combined parts.
In the afternoon, lessons on observational skills were also practiced as students learned about mapping, and sketching their neighborhood. We walked in New Center, Detroit to observe how people were using the buildings and streets. One of the main take-aways from this segment is learning about inclusive design, existing city conditions, human behaviors, traces, or patterns. Re-imagining students’ role in the real-world is a key concept that enable new ideas to take shape on improving equity.
Throughout the program the students learned about how the US Education system has been impacted through civic engagement and the use of the court systems to segregate and desegregate schools as well as the overall impact of redlining, blockbusting and restrictive covenants. The goal of combining social and civic engagement, equity, education, history and design was not only to provide a common base of knowledge but also to allow the students to think about how systems and places were designed and who those systems and places were designed for and who may have been excluded.
After learning about Detroit and other cities, Social & Civic Engagement, Equity in Education, MAD Detroit addressed a problem. The problem the students wanted to address was improving the taste and quality of student lunches. What would lunches look like? How can a city of their own creation meet their needs? Each student was given a piece of 8.5” x 11” paper to represent a parcel or lot. As a group, everyone brainstormed a network of programs of what they wanted their city to have, such as a welcome center, parks, hospital, schools, and a bakery. After all programs were decided, each student was responsible to design the layout on their parcel by creating approximately six three-dimensional shapes to represent each program. Once each student completed their parcel, we combined the lots to make a “Mighty City”. While giving their Final Presentation, each student practiced public-speaking and leadership skills by pretending to be a key-figure from their parcel (such as a PhD professor from the Hospital University Campus). Using their newly acquired role, they developed strategies that could improve the problem they were addressing by thinking about the greater parts of a whole.
Communities First, Inc., is a non-profit Community Development Corporation founded in 2010. The priorities of CFI are affordable housing, economic development, green programs and quality of life programs. CFI is focused on the communities of Flint and Detroit. CFI created the MAD Detroit Service program to empower people and build community. The program can used to empower youth or engage a community minded group of individuals. In addition to the service project the participants are exposed to volunteer activities, team building and leadership programs as well as Culture Shock programs. More information about Communities First, Inc. can be found at communitiesfirstinc.org.