“Working with good researchers who aren’t only here for the research but engage with the community and understand participants’ culture and language to help achieve meaningful data is really important to us.”

~ Dr. Richard Bryce

Led by Victoria Shaw, “Making Change through Making Art” will bring together Detroit-based visual artists with students from Detroit Public Schools Community District in a new art-making elective class to explore how engaging with visual arts can promote social justice activism.

Manuel Martinez has been working at the Michigan Central Station for the past three-and-a-half years, leading a 23-person project team that manages hundreds of construction workers. The project, which Ford announced in 2018, is expected to be finished next year.

Alumnus Leon Pryor excelled in careers at Microsoft, Amazon, and now Meta. The he renowned video game engineer co-founded The Motor City Alliance to make Detroit a powerhouse for FIRST Robotics teams. And it’s working.

The Bell Family Scholarship Fund is intended to assist students who hail from Detroit and who plan to pursue the Detroit teaching school pathway. It was started by Stacy and Joseph Giles to honor Stacy’s parents and sister, who were educators.

Five projects will receive funding in the latest round of Pressing Matters grants, a research incentive funding program that supports research advancing the state of practice in Taubman College’s various disciplines and forges new interdisciplinary opportunities. The projects include one that aims to reconstruct Black Bottom, a thriving Afro-American community sacrificed for urban renewal projects in the 1950s and 1960s.

The data is alarming: Black and low-income people are two to five times more likely to die in childbirth or experience severe maternal morbidity than those who are white. But one important voice has largely been missing from the conversation: the patients themselves.

“A lot of people come to Detroit with expectations of making big changes fast. I was probably one of those people. What we’ve learned is that change is happening here, but it’s got a pace of its own. I’ve learned a lot by being a part of this city.” 

~Justin Mast, founder of Bloomscape.

An interdisciplinary team of 20 master’s students from SEAS, as well as the Ross School of Business, Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning and the School of Social Work, worked throughout the semester alongside Paige and others at Bailey Park to advance sustainability knowledge through various community engaged projects.