), facilitating regular corporate functions like onboarding\/offboarding, and supporting a robust company culture.<\/span><\/p>\nAs marketing coordinator, my role is to build our portfolio of marketing materials to grow awareness of our product, people, and services. This has primarily taken the form of a company podcast, for which I am writer, host, and sound engineer, designed to connect our people across our offices worldwide. I\u2019ve also been tasked with developing additional B2B marketing materials, such as blog posts and infographics.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nTell us about the challenge project you\u2019re currently working on; what are you learning from the experience?<\/b><\/p>\n
We just finished our second challenge project, working alongside the Marygrove Conservancy to reenvision Marygrove as a community campus for arts and culture.\u00a0<\/span>I\u2019ve learned a great deal and am most grateful for the opportunity to build the space anew, a process that captures the ethos of Detroit so beautifully for me.\u00a0<\/span>I hope our work together leads to Marygrove becoming a hub for the neighborhoods in the area. I hope my team\u2019s work specifically, synthesizing interview responses of community culture bearers, leads to conditions that allow Detroit\u2019s arts to thrive.\u00a0<\/span>
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\u201cIf you can feed yourself you can free yourself.\u201d Shout out D-Town Farm.<\/p><\/div>\n
How do you hope to impact the community as a Fellow?<\/b>
\n<\/b><\/p>\n
All I really hope for is that I was able to meet a need of someone here somehow. Being a product of Metro Detroit and having to move away when I was a kid, I felt a calling to return to this city. It was where my parents built their American life together.\u00a0<\/span>However, just showing up wasn\u2019t enough. I had to figure out how my skill set could contribute to some real positive change.\u00a0<\/span>I hope that this journey I\u2019m on inspires others like me to intentionally give back to the city that has given so much to us and to the world.<\/span><\/p>\nWhat are you most looking forward to as a Fellow this year?<\/b><\/p>\n
I\u2019m most looking forward to being immersed in people again. The pandemic was rough, separating us from our people, isolating us. I personally thrive in group environments like this fellowship, so I\u2019m looking forward to being in loving community with others again.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nPlease share the most memorable moment you have experienced so far as a Fellow. Why was it memorable and how has it impacted you?<\/b><\/p>\n
My most memorable moment so far is hearing from Martin, one of the groundskeepers and operations managers at Marygrove. He\u2019d been taking care of that space for over 30 years. The way he spoke about the campus and his work there, I hope I\u2019m able to achieve that level of dedication and care in my lifetime.<\/span><\/p>\nIf someone is reading this and considering applying to be a Fellow, share why you would encourage them to apply?<\/b><\/p>\n
The Fellowship provided me with an opportunity to tap into a new industry. If you asked me five years ago if I thought I\u2019d be working in tech, I probably would have laughed and proceeded to read some postcolonial theory or something. <\/span>I\u2019m still reading theory, but now I\u2019m doing it with a more grounded, results-driven approach. I thank the Fellowship for putting me in an environment to realize this change. <\/span>Ye said it best in jeen-yuhs act iii. \u201cWe only got a hundred years here. So we gotta go after it, while it\u2019s our time!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Akash Raje is a 2022-2023 Fellow. Akash grew up in Farmington Hills, MI and Midlothian, VA, then went on to University of Virginia to earn a Bachelor of Arts in African American & African Studies. Tell us about your host company and your role in the organization. My host company is Autonomic, a subsidiary of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":286,"featured_media":27701,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,15,17,12,18,39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27699","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-givedetroit","category-leaddetroit","category-livedetroit","category-playdetroit","category-workdetroit","category-y10-fellow-spotlights"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.challengedetroit.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27699","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.challengedetroit.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.challengedetroit.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.challengedetroit.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/286"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.challengedetroit.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27699"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.challengedetroit.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27699\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.challengedetroit.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27701"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.challengedetroit.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.challengedetroit.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.challengedetroit.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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