FA C UL TY & S TU D E N T S
Engaging Detroit Workshop transcends disciplines to focus on real-life community engagement ONE OF THE THINGS THAT Detroit planning and evaluation consultant Jane Fran Morgan enjoys most about her work is the variety. “You’re working with different organizations in different contexts and with different challenges,” says Morgan. “And you’re always thinking about new approaches, which requires a certain amount of creativity.” As the 2019–2020 Sojourner Truth Fellow at Taubman College, Morgan wanted to bring creativity to the community engagement workshop she taught during the winter semester. Eric Dueweke, lecturer in urban and regional planning, was the co-facilitator. The Sojourner Truth Fellowship engages scholars and practitioners who can bring rigorous attention to issues of race and ethnicity as they relate to the theory and practice of urban and regional planning. Beyond that, Morgan’s objective was “to create something that was fun, engaging, and useful for students” — urban planning and architecture students alike. The four-part weekend workshop series — Engaging Detroit: Maximizing Solutions for Impact — connected students with organizations in Detroit that are experiencing community engagement challenges and gave them an opportunity to work in teams to develop solutions to those problems. Morgan and Dueweke deliberately paired students from different programs in teams to foster an interdisciplinary approach to problem solving. Morgan, a Detroit native, says it was important that she bring students into the community and provide them with valuable real-world experience: “A number of them hadn’t been to Detroit, and they certainly hadn’t been working directly with a community-based organization. I wanted to give them that experience, so that they had a better understanding of what it means to do community engagement work and to put their toe in the water.” That’s exactly what drew Serena Brewer, M.Arch ’21, to the workshop in the first place. She wanted to step beyond her traditional architecture curriculum to explore her 38
SPRING 2020 TAUBMAN COLLEGE
interest in community engagement. “Many architecture schools don’t offer this kind of experience,” says Brewer, who is considering pursuing a graduate certificate in community action and research through U-M. “So I thought this was a good opportunity to get engaged and learn firsthand the kind of work I would be doing.” During the first session, students visited the three participating organizations: HOPE Village Revitalization, Grandmont Rosedale Development Corporation, and the Center for Community-Based Enterprise (C2BE). They met with executive directors to learn about each organization’s mission, its impact on Detroit neighborhoods, and its particular community engagement issue. In the second session, students heard from a panel of Detroitarea community engagement leaders who introduced them to community engagement approaches, and later
During the four-part Sojourner Truth Workshop in winter 2020, interdisciplinary teams of students presented ideas to representatives from three partnering agencies in Detroit.
