Adams said that even when dealing with difficult topics like race, “I have figured out a way to make the Socratic method humane and useful. If you do it right, it’s like being an orchestra conductor. You’ve got your violins, your woodwinds, and all the different horns, and you get them all playing together.”

Ahmad Nassar was on his way to medical school like many other children of immigrants but his entrepreneurial spirit and devotion to being part of the ongoing revitalization of Detroit compelled him to take a sharp turn in his career. He went on to found Detroit 75 Kitchen, a food truck service in Southwest Detroit.

Part of helping people thrive is making sure the neighborhoods where they live are thriving too. For the past 25 years, Urban Neighborhood Initiatives has focused on serving the people and places within a 1.4-square-mile-area of the Springwells neighborhood in Southwest Detroit. 

The Michigan Innocence Clinic is the first exclusively non-DNA innocence clinic in the country. Since its inception, the clinic has won the release of 40 men and women who had been wrongfully convicted of crimes and served anywhere from a few months to 46 years in prison.

Katie Shulman’s fiber art will be on view in Myrrha, a collaborative exhibition with woodworker Forrest Hudes, at I.M. Weiss Gallery in Detroit. It runs through May 6.

In partnership with University of Michigan and the Detroit Public Schools Community District, the city of Detroit is bringing back Saturdays in the D. It’s a free program that provides fun, enriching activities for 75-100 Detroit youth (middle and high school) and 100 adults.

“Unfortunately, almost by definition, early stage startups have no revenue and little money to pay attorneys for much needed legal services. Because the clinic is free of charge, I never have to turn away a client for inability to pay.”

~ Tifani Sadek, co-director of Michigan Law’s Zell Entrepreneurship Clinic

How do you make sure that growth is good? This was the overarching question students at The School at Marygrove explored for their final projects about creating equitable growth in their hometown of Detroit. It was the culminating assignment for the economics class taught by lead teacher Brandon Moss and student teacher Hunter Janness.

The students met with Detroit entrepreneurs and energy experts to understand the most pressing energy needs in the city. Those meetings helped them create how-to guides on how Detroit business owners can make their business “greener” and obtain funding through the Inflation Reduction Act to make changes.