Architecture graduate student Torri Smith is a Detroit native with a passion to elevate the diverse narratives of minority students in the design field.

An important aspect of their mission is to continue building meaningful partnerships with businesses and organizations in the Detroit area that support and advance Detroit youth. Detroit Kids Matter is an online business with occasional pop-ups. 

The variety and volume of the efforts are a collaboration with Detroit’s neighborhoods, its community organizations and its residents. While the specific goals and partners of each effort vary, all of the work aims to help boost the vitality of Detroit and the region. 

“The program allows students to study across a variety of disciplines and learn on a number of different fronts related to real estate and development,” said Marc Norman, director of real estate initiatives at Taubman College and associate professor of practice in urban and regional planning. 

An important goal of the class was to ensure that the creative prompts and project instructions were clear, manageable and fun. To this end, students gathered “real world” user feedback from Stamps lecturer Emilia White and alumna Sarah Buckius, both of whom are parenting young children at home.

A portion of the SHoP Architects gift will support the development of online teaching materials for Michigan Architecture Prep (ArcPrep), Taubman College’s semester-long program that introduces juniors in the Detroit Public Schools to  architecture and urbanisms.

The first Semester in Detroit took place in Winter 2009 with 14 participants, partnering with organizations such as Alternatives for Girls, Detroit Eastside Community Collaborative, and the Urban League of Southeastern Michigan.

In this episode of Michigan Minds, Danyelle Reynolds, assistant director for student learning and leadership at the Ginsberg Center, discusses six ways that members of the community can exercise power…

“The other thing we want students to learn, and this is central to the work of the historian Tiya Miles, is that slavery is a part of the history of Detroit and Ontario. It’s not just this terrible thing that happened in the U.S. South. Their stories of survival and resistance are important, and we can learn from them and be inspired today, on both sides of the river.”
~ Darin Stockdill