Detroit – Taking Responsibility For Improved Health And Sustainability

The City of Detroit, once the shining example of industrialization, now struggles with urban decay, crime, rampant unemployment, and general devastation. But, through the efforts of responsible residents who have taken on the challenge to restore their city, a mild transformation is taking place that is helping to create a healthy community that can serve as a model for others.

In 1953, Detroit’s population was 2 million, the majority white. Thirty seven years later, the city counts less than 900,000, the majority black. Says Grace Lee Boggs of The Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership, “we needed a new kind of city where citizens take responsibility for their decisions for improved health and sustainability instead of leaving them to politicians or the marketplace”.

Responsible Leadership – From The Bottom Up

As a result, a number of grass root organizations have formed over the years to take action on creating a healthier environment for residents, young and old. One of these organizations is Detroit Summer, a multi-racial, inter-generational collective which works to transform the community by confronting the problems they face through creativity and critical thinking. Detroit Summer currently organizes youth-led media arts projects and community-wide potlucks, speak-outs and parties.

Another community organization making a change towards health is Earthworks, a program of the Capuchin Soup Kitchen, a human service organization of caring people inspired by the spirit of St. Francis and sponsored by the Capuchins of the Province of St. Joseph and concerned benefactors. Earthworks seeks to promote sustainable agricultural practices, nutrition and care for the Earth through the creation and sustenance of urban farms within the city of Detroit. Named one of the Top 10 urban farms by Natural Home magazine in 2009, 80 percent of the vegetables, fruit it produces are used by the Capuchin Soup Kitchen. The farm also supplies Gleaners Food Bank and sells produce at local markets.

Currently, there are more than 150 community gardens in Detroit. According to Ashley Atkinson of the Garden Resource Product Collective, there are some 600 family, community and school gardens (in addition to the countless individual backyard gardens) in the city, with 8,000 adults and children working them. “They’re improving every neighborhood in the city,” she said. “If you look at a map, they are in every neighborhood. They’re having an impact at all levels.”

Detroit: City Of Hope

In 2007, the Detroit: City of Hope campaign was launched to identify, encourage and promote infrastructure-building initiatives that include:

• Expansion of urban agriculture and small businesses to create a sustainable local economy.
• Reinvention of work so that it is not simply done for a paycheck but to develop people and build community.
• Reinvention of education to include children in activities that transform themselves and their environment.
• Creation of co-ops to produce local goods for local needs.
• Replacing punitive justice with restorative justice programs to keep nonviolent offenders out of prison.

Detroit – Ground Zero For The Sustainability Movement

The people are re-imagining their city in fresh and courageous ways and there is a lot to learn from them.

Ron Williams of AlterNet writes –

Do not underestimate the capacity of this city to achieve great things. I would argue that Detroit not only still matters, but it is at this moment the single most important city in North America. Detroit is coming to a neighborhood near you-it is an early warning of what urban communities across the US and far beyond are facing as those post-industrial, peak oil hurricane winds gather strength. Nowhere else are the opportunities to re-invent, re-think, re-build and re-imagine a major American city greater than Detroit today. With the city’s current leadership hypnotized by what they see as a civic death spiral, new leadership is coming from the place it always does in the end-from the bottom up. This new life cycle is a grassroots affair with an astonishing number of people fashioning solutions and affirming. There are now eight hundred community gardens on abandoned lots, peace zones for public safety, green retrofitting of empty houses, new open source media projects and an exploding hip hop and poetry scene.

This June, as many as 10,000 people from around the world will be convening in Detroit for the US Social Forum. They are organizing around the statement: “Another Detroit is Happening.” and have chosen the city because it is ground zero in today’s global financial meltdown.

As writer Rebecca Solnit said in the July 2007 issue of Harper’s Magazine, “Detroit is where change is most urgent and therefore most viable. The rest of us will get there later, when necessity drives us too, and by that time Detroit may be the shining example we can look to—the post-industrial green city that was once the steel-gray capital of Fordist manufacturing.”

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Tags: city of Detroit, Detroit, healthy community, improved health, responsible leadership, sustainability