For our first challenge of the 2023-2024 program year, we partnered with the Detroit Parks Coalition (DPC), an alliance of organizations that supports healthy, equitable and vibrant parks through fundraising, collaboration and advocacy. Five teams of Fellows worked alongside the Detroit Parks Coalition staff, park coalition members and community stakeholders as they created deliverables focused on outreach and engagement for Detroit parks – learn more from the perspective of each team here!
Our team was tasked with answering the question: “How might we connect mature adults to Detroit parks?” Like everything Challenge Detroit and design thinking has taught us, answering this question would require empathy and an unrelenting commitment to community involvement. Our collaboration with Detroit Parks Coalition and community stakeholders was vital in propelling our team forward into the ideation and prototyping phases of this project. As one stakeholder, Addison Mauck of the Detroit Riverfront Conservancy said, “There is no way for a park to succeed without a community connection.”
Through our empathy and discovery, we began to realize that the mature adult population, especially within the world of park programming, is an underrepresented group. Stakeholders from around the city talked about the emphasis that their park had placed on increasing youth participation. We dug into these questions: Do mature adults go to parks? Is there programming that is available to them? Do people care? We listened and understood that parks are for everybody, and in order to connect mature adults to Detroit parks, we had to make this message clear. In the end, our deliverables directly reflected this mission. Our newsletter calendar offers up-to-date, accessible information that is targeted for mature adults. We created our newsletter calendar to be reformattable to different sizes such as flyers and postcards, so that the mature adult population could be reached without the necessity of technology. A curated list of hotspot locations give DPC the opportunity to connect with local banks, post offices, social security offices, etc using flyers and posters. And a biannual survey ensures that community engagement is ongoing, and our Drop-off Box gives mature adults the opportunity to connect with DPC in a physical, tangible, and accessible way. We submitted our final deliverables with the hope that they can be used in the ways we intended: to increase access, awareness, and equity throughout the City of Detroit.
Blog by Fellow Team: Carolyn Gonzalez-Bright, Cheng Zhang, Raquel Santos, Kameron Bloye, Jolie Habashy, Bella Fernandez
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