It’s easy to talk about the challenges the city of Detroit faces. It’s much more difficult to create a pathway for tackling those issues. But that’s exactly what the University of Michigan Detroit Center intends to do. 

Since December, the community outreach center and outpost of the Ann Arbor-based university has been hosting a series of community meetings focused on grassroots efforts within the city dedicated to making improvements for all – and finding solutions to support them. 

The series, called “Workshop of Democracy: 21st Century Solutions from the Motor City,” will feature panel discussions on five topics throughout the winter and spring. BridgeDetroit will be the media partner, offering moderators for panels and covering the lessons learned. 

Among the topics: food sovereignty, community land trusts, equitable economic development, environmental justice and police reform. 

Paul Draus, UM Detroit Center faculty director, said too often Detroit has been viewed as a site of social and economic problems and not as a source of solutions or strategies for the future. He and his colleagues want to engage the community and compile a list of recommendations or best practices for how Detroit can teach the rest of the world. 

In planning the event series, which coincides with the Center’s 20th anniversary, Draus said he wanted to elevate the fact that Detroit has been democratically challenged in the 21st Century, specifically by the loss of political control during the period of bankruptcy and emergency management from 2013-2014, which subjected citizens of the city to the control of the state.  

“As a Black-majority city existing within a white-majority state and nation, Detroit has also had to repeatedly contend with the biases embedded in policies imposed upon its population, as well as the loss of power and influence resulting from population decline and economic disinvestment, not to mention the structural shocks of the foreclosure crisis and Great Recession,” he told us. 

“In spite of these challenges, Detroiters have insisted on driving the process of developing solutions from the ground up, offering locally-based alternatives to state policy prescriptions.”

This is ultimately why BridgeDetroit decided to partner in this event series: We celebrate and recognize Detroiters who, through their own skills and resilience, have found a way forward in increasingly challenging times. And we want to uplift the efforts that are going right. 

If you would like to attend one of the panels, registration is now open.

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