Tee Rushdan arranged private meetings with the mayor and his staff to craft an exemption for farmers, as well as addressing questions about water and land access. “I said, ‘A lot of cities – Philly, New York – have installed directors of urban agriculture,” Rushdan explains. “’Let’s get somebody in the city that’s focused on that.’ I didn’t know it was going to be me.”

As AliReda Jeafar approaches graduation at UM-Dearborn, he has a full-time job with the City of Detroit that he loves. But it took a reassessment of goals and a life detour to find a career path he’s passionate about.

“Coming to the Detroit Center, it’s natural for me to try to take a similar type of approach. What’s the Detroit Center already doing? Every time I hear about something new, I try to ask more because now I have the license to be nosy. That’s a characteristic of sociologists anyway. We want to ask questions. We want to know, what are you doing in that community? What are the results of that study going to be? Who is going to benefit from that? How can we help you with that at the Detroit Center?”

~ Paul Draus, U-M Detroit Center faculty director

Eight new initiatives have been selected to receive funding from the 2023 Engage Detroit Workshops grant program. This is the second year of the program to promote the development of innovative projects that forge connections between U-M and the Detroit community.

A jointly sponsored UM-Dearborn – UM-Flint Collaborative Research Funding Program awarded up to $160,000 for four collaborative research projects.

Sherelle Hogan’s goal is to create a service model that can be replicated nationwide to combat the cycle of incarceration.

“I will tell you this: When I published articles about this topic, no one was like, ‘I want to read it! How can I read it? With the film, I had so many people who couldn’t make it to the festival writing me, saying, ‘I want to see it! How can I see it?’”

~ Dara Hill, associate professor of reading and language arts in the College of Education, Health, and Human Services at UM-Dearborn

The Office of Metropolitan Impact is instrumental in organizing SEMI Wild and its career and education pathway program that connects underrepresented youth to organizations like UM-Dearborn, the Detroit Zoological Society, Belle Isle Nature Center and others.

“We are very proud of being able to create a space for the community to be welcomed on a day-to-day basis, but also to have their voices heard, whether that’s in local activists or community members having a Q&A and discussion, or just having more representative films. Representation really does matter.”
~ Tim Guthat