“I’m most proud about the Respect Cafe. It’s attached to the Charles Wright Museum of African American History. The museum caters a lot of events and this cafe gives them flexible space. There are two parts to the name. One is an homage to Aretha Franklin. The other is respect to Detroiters.”

After graduating from Princeton, Mark Wallace moved to Detroit, where he briefly worked as a teacher. Deciding that he needed to make a career change, he went back to grad school at U-M to “reassess” how to be useful. “It had always been a priority of mine to do something to make life better for those kids and the families who live here.”

Wayne S. Brown hears and feels Detroit like a musical composition, a songbook that tells his life story and that of the city through its crescendos and decrescendos, its mournful lamentations to its soaring arias. Brown, a University of Michigan alum who serves as president and CEO of Michigan Opera Theatre, knows Detroit as the place that enriched his childhood, gave him his love of performing music and his first job opportunity with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. It now serves as his inspiration to bring opera off of the stage and out into a community ready to embrace it.

It was his work with Detroit Sip and becoming a regular face at block club meetings, that resulted in Bill Lovejoy winning a Spirit of Detroit award from the Detroit City Council in 2018. This award remains one of his proudest achievements to date. “Anything I do in Detroit I do with local residents, and without them I do nothing.”

For the last 10 years, Steve Tobocman has been at the center of efforts to bolster Metro Detroit’s immigrant communities and their contribution to the region’s economy. Since 2009, the University of Michigan alum has led Global Detroit, a non-profit dedicated to making the area welcoming to immigrants, attracting and retaining talent, revitalizing neighborhoods, and attracting business development.

More than 150 community members gathered to celebrate a year of “making” at the Brightmoor Maker Space recently. The Detroit Community Schools and the University of Michigan’s Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design hosted the open house to celebrate its first academic year in operation.

“We’re not just showcasing the work of the university, but of the university and our partners in the city. We hope there will be a lot of spark and new partnerships form,” said Sonia Harb, special advisor on Detroit engagement for the provost’s office, of the purpose of um3detroit.

A new University of Michigan report provides the most detailed characterization to date of the phosphorus sources—and their relative contributions—in the complex Detroit River watershed, which is heavily urbanized on the U.S. side of the border and mainly agricultural on the Canadian side.

About a decade ago, wine expert Blake Kownacki met Claes Fornell, a retired University of Michigan business professor and expert on customer satisfaction. Their conversations blossomed into a friendship based on their mutual admiration for good wine, and they started to brainstorm how to put Detroit back on the map as a wine-centric, agri-entertainment center.