For our final Impact Project, Geraldine Chi and I are working in association with Hazon, a national Jewish organization aimed at building a healthier and more sustainable Jewish community through environmentalism. For our project, however, we focused on the Challenge Design question: “How might we leverage urban agriculture and the Michigan Jewish Food Festival to inspire regional interest in and support of Detroit’s continued development?”

To simplify this question, we really wanted to capture Jewish suburban residents’ interest in and impressions of Detroit and find connections between Jewish suburbanites and Detroit’s shared history of food through conducting interviews with stakeholders. We would then use this information and build out a marketing toolkit that includes promotional ideas that can be distributed to city and suburban attendees of the Michigan Jewish Food Festival to create a more connected, unified, and robust regional community and a strategic plan for regional community engagement via urban agriculture and/or food culture.

We started out our first Friday by interviewing Jerry Ann Hebron, who is the Executive Director of the North End Christian CDC and manages the Oakland Avenue Farm, along with the current Hazon fellows (who also work closely with Jerry and her farm). Geraldine and I learned a lot about Hazon’s partnership with the Oakland Avenue Farm and their investment into the North End community, which was historically a Jewish neighborhood.

On our second week in the project, we focused mainly on conducting interviews. Some of these interviews involved speaking with representatives from organizations like Yad Ezra, a Jewish food pantry that offers Kosher groceries for underprivileged Jewish residents, Hillel Day School, and Congregation Shaarey Zedek. The insights we captured from the interviews on this second Friday proved to be incredibly important in regards to synthesizing our deliverables and understanding the relationship many Jewish suburbanites have with the city of Detroit.

Garden at Yad Ezra

In our third week, we observed the final meeting for the Michigan Jewish Food Festival at Eastern Market, we conducted our remaining interviews, and we witnessed Shabbat at the Oakland Avenue Farm (what a treat!). This final week was especially filled with food and good company. During this final week, we also focused on building out our final deliverables for our upcoming presentation.

Shabbat at Oakland Avenue Farm

Although it’s too early to reveal our conclusions, I can say confidently that this project was exactly how I imagined finishing out my Challenge Detroit year. I cherished the wonderful people we met and conversations we had, and through this project I learned more about Hazon, the Jewish community, and Detroit.