Paper

Olivia Lazarski

COMP 105

Darling

12/3/14

It Takes a Village

            Detroit is in terrible condition. The houses and roads are dilapidated, the crime rate is sky high, there are hundreds of homeless people without food and shelter, there isn't much business for the city, the city went bankrupt and they almost had to sell the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA). Until recently, no one was doing anything about it. Community activism is what is currently trying to turn the city around. The volunteers and workers who have been helping have worked at Gleaner's Food Bank, volunteered at homeless shelters or soup kitchens, opened businesses around the city, cleaned up the streets, and they started groups like night watches to protect the city and help the police officers. Because of people that want to help a city, the city can become something that it never was before. Community activism can turn a city on a dime.

            One way in which community activists help Detroit is by volunteering at Gleaner's food bank. "For more than 37 years, Gleaners Community Food Bank has been feeding hungry people and nourishing our communities. Last year, Gleaners distributed 41 million pounds of emergency food to more than 550 partner soup kitchens, shelters and pantries in Wayne, Oakland, Macomb, Livingston and Monroe counties." (gcfb.org) I have personally spent a day there with my swim team in high school. As soon as we got there, we were put to work. I started out by sorting through canned food and sorting through the expired food and the unexpired food. We threw out the expired food and put the good food on a table. After that, I was needed on the assembly line. There, they sent a large cardboard box down rollers that stretched about 50 feet long. There were people standing on both sides of the line. Each person would put one food item in each box. After doing this for a few hours, we ended up packaging over 600 boxes filled with food; we beat the previous record of 540.  Knowing that I helped people in need that day gave me a really good feeling. Being a community activist and helping out people and cities in need helps not only other people, but it helps you. It helps you to become a better person.

            Another thing that community activists do is volunteer at homeless shelters or soup kitchens. One example of a homeless shelter in Detroit is the Detroit Rescue Mission Ministry. "Founded in 1909, The Detroit Rescue Mission Ministries has embarked upon its 104th year of continued service providing food, shelter and services to intervene where homelessness and substance addiction occur. DRMM is a faith-based, non-profit organization, recognized by the Commission on Accreditation of Rehabilitation Facilities (CARF) and has devoted a wealth of resources to meet the basic needs of humanity while motivating individuals to rebuild their lives, one life at a time. The Detroit Rescue Mission Ministries is one of the largest providers in the fight against homelessness and substance abuse in the country." (drmm.org/about) When you volunteer at a homeless shelter, you can do anything from clean up for them, help them get dressed or get cleaned if they need the help, or just simply playing a card game with them. Sometimes, there are soup kitchens inside of homeless shelters so that the homeless people can have a hot meal and a place to sleep. This is bettering Detroit because if these people get the help they need, they could possibly get enough motivation, strength, or resources to get a job. This pushes the whole economy of Detroit forward, just through community activism. If you simply do your part, you are helping someone else do theirs.

            Detroit's streets can be a mess. Not necessarily in downtown Detroit, but in the neighborhoods and the ghettos, the streets can be bad. Houses are burnt down, lawns haven't been mowed in a long time, there's broken glass and trash on the sidewalks, and a lot more. http://archive.freep.com/article/20140811/NEWS01/308110170/Life-Remodeled-Cody-Detroit On this site is the story of a crew of GM engineers who went to Detroit's West side and mowed lawns, boarded up windows in abandoned houses, picked up trash and debris, and more. They ended up having over 10,000 volunteers and these volunteers also handed out over 1,000 meals to people in need. Community activism doesn't just help people and their health, it helps the actual community and its health and well-being. Cleaning up the city could cause people to actually have their faith restored in the city. Growing up in a city that has been so trashy and worn down for so long can be a downer. You might think that you'll never see results. Seeing people coming from all over to help clean up your city even a little bit can start to bring your hopes up. Maybe the city can become great again like it once was.

            Furthermore, groups have been set up to help with the crime in Detroit. There is so much crime that the police officers can't handle it all themselves. According to Forbes magazine, Detroit is the number 1 ranked most dangerous city in the US thanks to gang-related violence and crime. One organization is the Detroit Public Safety Foundation. On Angel's Night, they have 50,000 plus volunteers help out in the city. "Each year, roughly 50,000 Angels’ Night volunteers patrol city streets, turn on their porch lights and watch over their neighborhoods. We will continue to patrol our city’s neighborhoods, watch our blocks, turn on our porch lights and adopt vacant or abandoned buildings. Together, we can make Detroit a place where neighbors and volunteers join together to move our city forward." (http://www.detroitpublicsafetyfoundation.org/dfd-fire/angels-night/) This is a great example of community activism because almost a whole community is volunteering to keep another one safe.  

                Community activism doesn't just help Detroit. People help out their communities all over the US and the globe. One example is in Chicago, where the crime rate is extremely high. One man, named Andrew Holmes, is a great example of a community activist. "Holmes is a community activist who works to defuse violence in some of Chicago’s toughest neighborhoods and encourages residents to help police following crimes. He says his motivation to do this work began when he himself was the victim of a shooting 25 years ago. 'It took me six months to learn how to walk all over again,' he says. 'I can feel deep down a lot the pain a lot of them go through because I just about didn’t make it,' Holmes says. Today, he monitors police radios and gets tip from cops. He’s quickly at a crime scene passing out fliers that he himself pays for. Holmes insists he’s willing to talk to the media only to call attention to crimes and to find the criminals. 'It’s not about me. It’s not about the fame. It’s about helping people,' he says." (chicagocbslocal) . Chicago has an Andrew Holmes day dedicated to the work he does in cleaning up crime in their city. If everyone was like Holmes, maybe there wouldn't even be crime anymore.

            Grace Lee Boggs is a terrific example of a community activist. In her book, "The Next Great American Revolution," she has a whole chapter dedicated to Detroit and what she has done to help and what she thinks still needs to be done to help. The chapter is titled "Detroit, Place and Space to Begin Anew." The very first sentence of this chapter is "Detroit is a city of hope rather than a city of despair." I love this because in order to be a community activist, you have to see the good in things that are potentially really bad. You have to feel passionate about you community no matter how bad it might have become. "The thousands of vacant lots and abandoned houses provide not only the space to begin anew, but also the incentive to create innovative ways of making our living -- ways that nurture our productive, cooperative, and caring selves." I also think this is a good example because she doesn't look at the abandoned lots and vacant houses as just wastes of space, she looks at them as a fresh start. That's how community activists are. They see the good in the bad. She then goes on to talk about the economy and how it is in bad shape. "Instead of trying to resurrect or reform a system whose endless pursuit of economic growth has created a nation of material abundance and spiritual poverty... we need to build a new kind of economy from the ground up." Community activists always try to start fresh and make things better that way. Boggs has even gone so far as to live in Detroit; for 55 years.

            One of her comments on the 1967 race riots in Detroit was "The media called it a 'riot,' but Detroiters called it a 'rebellion' because it was an understandable response by young people to the brutality and racism of a mostly white police force (or occupation army)."  I really like this as an example of community activism because, even though the riots were terrible and deadly, when they were over, she saw them as a rebellion to the racism. Again, she saw the good in the bad. She even added that Detroit's first black mayor was elected because of the riots.

            She adds a subtitle in this chapter called "planting the seeds of hope, "and in this, she talks about how Jimmy Boggs wants to start helping the city. He says in a speech that "we need to go where no we have never gone before and focus on creating communities." One way in which she "creates communities" is by founding Detroit Summer. Detroit Summer is "a multicultural, intergenerational youth program/ movement to rebuild, redefine, and respirit Detroit from the ground up." I like how she keeps saying "from the ground up" because it shows that they are willing to start from scratch to help this community.

            She talks about how some people didn't think that a program like this would help the community, but actually hurt it. Her rebuttal was "we never intended for it to be a traditional left-wing organization agitating masses of youth to protest and demonstrate. Nor did we intend that it become a large nonprofit corporation of the sort that raises millions of dollars from government, corporations, and foundations to provide employment and services to large populations...By contrast, our hope was that Detroit Summer would bring about a new vision and model of community activism --- one that was particularly responsive to the new challenges posed by the conditions of life and struggle in the postindustrial city." This shows how she is a great example of a community activist because she set up an organization to get the youth of Detroit to become community activists.

            Lastly, she talks about the "agricultural movement" in Detroit. "All over the city there are now thousands of family gardens, and dozens of school gardens. All over the city there are garden cluster centers that build relationships between gardeners living in the same area by organizing garden workdays and community meetings where participants share information on resources and how to preserve and market their produce." To sum up this, I like how she talks about bringing people together and building relationships. That is a huge part of community activism.     

            "That is what revolutions are about. They are about creating a new society in the places and spaces left vacant by the disintegration of the old; about evolving to a higher Humanity, not higher buildings; about Love of one another and the Earth, not Hate; about Hope, not Despair; about saying YES to Life and NO to war; about becoming the change we want to see in the world." (Boggs) We can become the change we want to see in the world by becoming community activists.