Three decades ago, an artist named Tyree Guyton turned two abandoned blocks around his grandfather’s house on Detroit’s east side into a landmark incorporating his signature polka dots along with found objects such as clocks, records and stuffed animals.

Cherish Fields graduated from U-M with the aid of a Blavin Scholarship, a program to help foster children attain college degrees. Today, as a social worker at a Detroit agency that assists children who are wards of the state, she is helping children just like herself.

A native Detroiter, Morisseau (BFA ’00, theatre) began writing plays as a student at SMTD, studying with Professor OyamO (Charles Gordon). Her three-play cycle, The Detroit Project, includes Skeleton Crew, Paradise Blue, and Detroit ’67.

For the kids who move often and change schools, the kids from families who have yet to receive a first college degree, the ones who don’t see themselves as college material, University of Michigan alumna Tonya Allen has a message: She was like you. She did it. You can too.

Rick Haas has been passionate about cars from a young age, purchasing his first vehicle with lawn-mowing money before he was old enough to get behind the wheel. His passion never waned, steering him toward engineering and a career in the automotive industry.

Quicken Loans, the nation’s largest online retail mortgage lender and the fourth largest retail home lender in the United States, is known as a Detroit corporate powerhouse.

For more than a decade, Detroit Connections, a series of courses offered through Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design, has been bringing students, staff and faculty from U-M’s Ann Arbor campus into two partner schools in Detroit to lead weekly art workshops and design collaborative projects with youth.

The David Bohnett Foundation Leadership and Public Service Fellowship, open to master’s students at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, offers two years of tuition support and a funded internship in Detroit.

As a kid, Detroit native Stephen Henderson, AB ’92, often typed his opinions regarding the local news and mailed them to the Detroit Free Press.