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, The Neighbors Awareness Team, began our project with the empathy phase. During this stage we met with more than 10 park stakeholders and even got to visit Palmer Park. As Barbara Barefield from Palmer Park led us through the community center, playscape, and restored historic log cabin, she reminded us of the joy that comes with play. Our team channeled our inner play on the swings, and learned about the different programming that brings people together in green spaces. As Barbara stressed the importance of community engagement, something she said stuck with us. “Surveying the neighborhoods and asking community members how they would like to see their parks will help in creating an outdoor home for community members.”

With this in mind, we moved from the empathy and define stages into the ideation process and created a sprawling wall of ideas. From a neighborhood conga line that leads to a park drop off, to promotional park postcards. It was fun to brainstorm ideas with the “Yes and” practice because it encouraged us to embrace each other’s ideas and see that the sky and our thoughts were limitless.

During the prototype phase we had to combine all of our ideas, reel them in, and work as transparent and cohesive teammates. We had to be realistic on the deliverables that we could produce and recommend to the Detroit Parks Coalition. Due to their small staff, we had to be mindful to not give more tasks to an already overworked team. It forced us to be creative but also to work together and we think we accomplished that. In the end, we produced three flyers, two postcards, two master lists, a needs assessment, and a community engagement checklist.

Presentation day, emotions were high. Everyone on the team had nerves all over the place, but we came together and supported each other. It was an experience to remember and a successful first challenge project.

Blog by Fellow Team: Caitlyn Bilkovsky, Dennis White, Tori Silvester, Justina Jeffers, Keke Jordan

***