Her partnerships with Detroit nonprofits fuel her fire for this work, Tawanna Dillahunt said recently during a conversation entitled, “Women in Tech: Closing the Gap,” showing how four women of color had found their way into technology-centric careers. 

Over the next three years, the team will focus their research on resource-constrained communities in Detroit’s Eastside neighborhood and a refugee resettlement agency that serves a public housing community in Ypsilanti, Michigan.

The project builds on Tawanna Dillahunt and Julie Hui’s partnership with the Friends of Parkside to pilot a “community tech worker” program to assist seniors requiring technology-related support. Tech workers will be embedded at Jefferson East to develop a sustainable, useful model that will help bridge the digital divide for small businesses. 

“To maximize our impact, each team is focusing on one specific area of need so we can address that same problem in multiple companies and develop expertise in that area. As a result, we have eight teams: four focusing on marketing problems and four focusing on operations.”
~ Michael Willard

The classes are offered by the Silver Center, a virtual senior center that offers enrichment and educational programs via phone to help adults 60 years old or older stay connected. While the program started before the pandemic, organizers hope it will mitigate some of the negative health and social impacts caused by social distancing during the coronavirus pandemic. 

University of Michigan School of Information students helped test tools for the city of Detroit that would connect residents to information about school districts, crime, demographics and property values. This data, if accessible, could inform Detroit residents as they make important decisions about their lives.

Talk about a winning team: A group of Wayne State University students were the grand-prize winners of two prizes in the Student Design Summit, a competition to find the “voices of young people” on a once-in-a-lifetime project to design a plaza that connects the Detroit Institute of Arts and its neighboring Midtown cultural institutions.

Detroit visitors now have four new urban tours to enjoy, thanks to help from a team of faculty and students at the University of Michigan School of Information (UMSI).