Growing up in the suburbs, I never knew or had reason to know how to get to Detroit from where I lived. Stranger still, I also never hesitated to tell the person next to me on a plane that I was from Detroit. There I would be, a so-called resident who didn’t even know how to get home. What a strange thing! Yet an incredibly common experience among Detroit suburbanites. I lived in a suburban bubble. It wasn’t until I graduated college that I realized just how insulated this bubble was.

My journey to Detroit began in 2009 when I became a volunteer for a(n eventually) Detroit-based community service organization. Unlike any other non-profit I had encountered, this one recruited, transported, and exposed young people to the city through, broadly speaking, community service activities. We worked in the neighborhoods. We were introduced to the residents. We fufilled community needs. Project sites were located all over the city. I never knew where I was in relation to anything I could locate, but this is how I got to know Detroit – in handfuls and covered in summer sweat. It is this partnership between suburban and city residents that brought me to Detroit. Then, six years later, compelled me to move here.

At the end of the Challenge Detroit Fellowship year, each fellow is given the opportunity to design and complete a project of their own with a non-profit partner of their choosing. I was fortunate to establish a partnership with an organization called Hazon Detroit. Along with my project partner Paulina Kriska, we are focusing on the topic of regionalism. More specifically, we are exploring how Hazon Detroit might, in conjunction with their mission to create healthier and more sustainable communities in the Jewish world and beyond, encourage more collaboration between suburban and city residents.

This project excites me! Myself an example of how impactful community programming and engagement can be, I know what potential lies within this effort. Although it’s still too early to share any conclusions, there is one story from a city resident that I might summarize to give context to this endeavor.

Marsha Music spoke about a time when Detroit’s North End and Black Bottom neighborhoods were vibrant places, packed with shops and busy merchants. Neighboring each other, the Jews formed a community in the North End and the African-Americans in Black Bottom. Both worked together. So much so that she recalls overhearing a frequent refrain about the world seeming to be 97% African-American and 3% Jewish. Both stood together in a fight against housing discrimination. Many homeowners held deeds forbidding them from selling their property to a Black or a Jew. Both moved together. Where the Jews went, the African-Americans followed. And then, in the 1960’s, their paths diverged.

As fellows on this project, our task is to dig into at least one way in which, perhaps, these two paths might converge again.