This year many people (co-workers, friends, my family [esp. my mother, hey Sharon]) will ask me when I am going to go back into a career that utilizes my major. I have a Bachelor’s degree in Urban Planning from the University of Virginia and I currently work in the newly renamed Community Investments Team at Rock Ventures. At RV I work on projects with non-profits in the community and help to build corporate partnerships through grants making and volunteer engagement. In college I spent a lot of time in studio and design classes that produced a lot of really nice maps, renderings, and final pin ups which were lovely and taught me a lot. Many people think of architecture and planning in just that way, but what individuals that are outside of that field don’t realize is that there are a lot more levels to our work that aren’t always visible in a physical model. For every drawing I produced, I also delivered a case study in community engagement. Studio classes like “Intro to Planning Design” and “Site Planning 2020” were countered with courses like “Housing and Community Development” or “Smart and Sustainable Communities.” Learning how to work with and for people played just as strong of a role in the development of my degree as learning how to interpret and meet zoning code, if not more. My favorite professor, Suzanne Moomaw, pressed over and over again that the success of design work is not possible without the consideration of the human that is being designed for. We took walks around the City of Charlottesville to speak with active and non-active residents of all different backgrounds before we ever laid a pencil on our drafting board.

To all those people whose question, “But when are you going to do planning again?” I say that I never really stopped. Community engagement is a critical part of planning, just as much so as understanding the regulations of the DOT and HUD. With the help of a good team and dedicated stakeholders, a good urban planner can truly do it all.

I do not have a degree in education by any stretch of the word. However, through a series of events and projects that have come into my life this past year, I have somehow found myself in the deepest of educational weeds – the Detroit Public School system. For the sake of clarity, let me outline my experience in education for you:

• I lived with a Teaching Coach of a Detroit charter school for 10 months.
• I worked on a partnership project with Detroit Public Schools (DPS) for 5 weeks to create implementations to enhance parent engagement.
• I coached exactly two Detroit PAL soccer teams of youth ages 4-6 most of whom attended schools in Detroit proper – charter, public, or otherwise.
• I served on the Transition Team for DPS Emergency Manager Judge Rhodes as a project manager for executives and leaders from Rock Ventures.
• I also led the Community Engagement Committee for Judge Rhodes team alongside my director, Leslie Andrews.
• I am currently leading four interns, three of which are DPS alumni, as they serve the transition team and other related entities at Rock Ventures.
• I dabble in the field of disruptive education. No, I don’t really know exactly what that means yet either.

That’s it. That’s literally all I know about education and it’s pretty scarce, except for my tutoring experience in college (shout out to Najay, the best 3^rd grade reader I ever knew). I’ve never been a teacher, spent significant time in a school aside from my own, or held responsibility for educating another human being. And all of these small experiences I had built off one another. Because of my project with Challenge Detroit and DPS, I was brought onto the transition team, and so on. I love kids, no doubt about it. I was a nanny for almost 5 years to a number of different families and I don’t mean to brag but I’m pretty great at helping out with that pesky algebra problem on a Wednesday night work sheet. But if there is one thing that I’ve learned from the wading that I’ve done in the ocean that is the present educational landscape, it is that simply loving children is not enough to make a successful educational leader.

Urban planning and education do not reveal an obvious connection, but this is the intersection that I have most recently found myself working in. Public School systems are multi-million, sometimes billion, dollar businesses. And it takes people who love kids and who love education to run those organizations. But those individuals must be incredibly talented in a specific field in addition to caring deeply about children. To run an effective school system you need talented teachers, and accountants, and nurses, and analysts, and custodial staff, and business strategists, and even urban planners, and leadership that knows how to run a multi-billion dollar business because to its very core that is what a public school system is. Diversity in the workplace is vital to an organization’s success and without all the necessary players, the organization can never succeed to its highest potential.

How does this relate to my impact project? Great question. I chose an impact project that aims to solve an education problem from all kinds of angles. Phoenix Academy is the first Education Achievement Authority (EAA) School to close in the City of Detroit leaving the building unoccupied and the students seeking alternative educational options. My partner, Urban Neighborhood Initiatives, along with the rest of the Education Coalition – a group dedicated to handling school closings in Southwest Detroit – took the conn on placing students and collecting community feedback on the real estate as they had been doing for years in their community. The coalition collected all of the bright minds with lots of knowledge AND a love for children. The group consists of representation from the EAA, DPS, non-profits in the community, elected official Raquel Castañeda-López’s office, neighborhood residents, urban planners, and parents.

UNI and members of the education coalition recognize that the closing of Phoenix Academy is not just an education problem, just a DPS problem, or just an EAA problem. This problem belongs to and affects a myriad of stakeholders and that makes it a community problem. UNI set out to document and prove just how vital community engagement is in the redevelopment of the Phoenix campus. Phoenix is not the first or the last school that is going to close in Southwest Detroit and without involving those who are most directly affected, the problem becomes cyclical. I am confident that capturing the effects of solving problems alongside community stakeholders will change the game when it comes to school redevelopment in the City of Detroit.

The work of UNI brings to mind a famous African proverb, “If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” I am proud to have the opportunity to be a part of the team UNI chose to go far.