For our fourth and last challenge of the 2022-2023 program year, we partnered with Teen HYPE, a nonprofit that works alongside Detroit area youth (12-24) to celebrate them and build collective power, agency, leadership, and critical skills—making it possible for them to enact positive change in their lives and communities. Five teams of Fellows worked alongside the Teen HYPE staff, Detroit 4 Youth (D4Y) consultants and stakeholders including youth to create deliverables focused on the Detroit Youth Action Plan (DYAP) for this project – learn more from the perspective of each team!
As soon as we learned we were working with Teen HYPE, we knew our fourth project was going to be unlike any of our other ones. The passion Teen HYPE has for working with youth was clear from day one and quickly spread amongst the Fellows. This passion coupled with a team whose members had been building chemistry over the course of the year made a strong start for this project. The part of this project that we especially loved was the opportunity to interview youth stakeholders. It was amazing to hear from youth leaders because they provided such fantastic insights that really helped us to understand where their passion for the Detroit Youth Action Plan comes from.
When it came time to ideate around marketing for the Detroit Youth Action Plan, we were able to come up with unique, out-of-the-box ideas. We kept this out-of-the-box thinking intact all the way through, even explaining our deliverables using a presentation instead of a traditional Word document. The piece outside of our teamwork that empowered the quality of our deliverables was working with an amazing liaison who cheered on our unique ideas and saw the vision for what we were trying to accomplish. This has been a perfect conclusion to an unforgettable fellowship year. We have now reached the most challenging part of Challenge Detroit — saying goodbye.
Blog by Fellow Team: Ahvae Richards, Ryan Wingfield, Diamonique Thomas, Desirée Quinn, Ian Hogg, Kellie Wasikowski
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