Meet Enid Parham, aka Chef Sunflower, who is renowned for her cannabis-infused culinary delights. She talks to Model D about her craft, and how the industry is linked to issues of social equity and criminal justice reform.
When the four "Sojourner Truth Girls" met in one of Detroit’s most controversial housing projects, little did they know the bonds they formed would have to endure racial segregation, riots, and the somewhat violent evolution of the washing machine.
According to the report, median income for white residents increased by 60 percent over the past ten years while increasing just 8 percent for Black Detroiters. Overall, the median income of Detroit is half that of the region.
Business manager Les Lance says he feels like his company has taken the hardest hit they've faced yet: “And we did it standing up.” It's this kind of resilience that LISC Detroit is fostering with loans for Detroit's small businesses.
More than 70 loans from Fitzgerald homeowners have been approved in a 0%-interest program designed to help residents repair houses in the neighborhood. With $1.05 million invested and 42 of those projects already completed, organizers want to get the word out.
Matt Naimi and Oren Goldenberg, the owners of the Recycle Here! and Lincoln Street Art Park complex, aim to combat displacement of artists and to preserve culture in the neighborhood where Naimi’s fostered a creative and green-minded community around a factory ruin and a garbage dump (as he fondly puts it) since 2005.
Juan Carlos Dueweke-Perez has come a long way from selling cheesecakes door-to-door in Southwest Detroit as a kid. Now the co-founder of Southwest Detroit Restaurant Week owns his own marketing agency and works toward bringing equity to minority- and immigrant-owned businesses: "I want to continue a legacy that doesn’t start or end with me.”
Detroit entrepreneur KaToya Scott has witnessed the joy her truck's ice cream can bring people, but she never expected her community to respond with an outpouring of support to help her business survive COVID-19 setbacks. "You don’t think people care and here are people saying ‘hey we see you.’ "
African Americans are now underrepresented in both COVID-19 cases and deaths. Still comprising just over 14% of the Michigan population, the two-week moving average for African American COVID cases was an estimated 9% in the first weeks of September, and the death rate has fallen to 12%.
Twelve years ago, a health scare prompted Harriet "Chef Bee" Brown to start "waging war with a fork" and launch a healthy catering company. She is just one of the entrepreneurs Detroit's nonprofit groups are working with to generate equitable opportunities through economic and workforce development in the city.
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