When Christine Bell joined
Urban Neighborhood Initiatives (UNI) in 2007 as a youth development director, she had a five-year plan in mind.
“I had moved around so much early in my career, and you never get to experience the highs and lows,” she says. “But, I felt like five years would give me that understanding of what happens in a place over time. And that was important to me.”
The place was Springwells, a vibrant and densely populated 1.4-square-mile neighborhood in Southwest Detroit. Despite her plan, Bell became the executive director of UNI in 2014 and continues in this role today. The nonprofit focuses on place-based community development, youth programming, and public space redevelopment between Fort, Dix, and Waterman streets.
About 17,000 residents live in Springwells, mainly those who identify as Latino, Latina, and Latinx, alongside African American, Native American, Appalachian, and Arab American populations. The demographics haven’t changed much in Bell’s eighteen years, although more people are emigrating from Venezuela, El Salvador, and the Middle East today. Some families have lived in the neighborhood for generations, while others are just moving in.
The community is diverse, intergenerational, and brimming with youthful energy. Nearly one-third of residents are children under 18, and nearly two-thirds are under 34. The people in the community shape UNI’s focus.
“Our work is about changing the social conditions in the Springwells neighborhood with the residents that live here,” Bell says. “We have a cradle-to-career youth program with youth development opportunities, but we are not a youth development organization. If you look at our data, it makes sense that we focus on the population because of how young our neighborhood is. And that has not changed since I got here.”
A Southfield native, Bell grew up involved in Detroit communities, from her church congregation on the city’s east side to her father’s longtime job as head rowing coach at the Detroit Boat Club. After graduating from Michigan State, she moved to Denver to live near the mountains, where she worked in foster care and family preservation, spending many hours in neighborhoods and people’s homes.
Working closely with families experiencing poverty shaped Bell's thoughts about social work and her role. She longed to return to give back to communities closer to home, so she quickly accepted her former pastor's offer of a VISTA position in Detroit youth development. Bell's role at UNI became a reality with the investment of the Skillman Foundation’s
Good Neighborhoods Initiative, a 10-year $100-million commitment in 2006 to six Detroit neighborhoods, including Southwest.
In 18 years, Bell has seen the community landscape undergo many changes, while aspects, like its vibrancy and cultural richness, have remained the same. Alongside and sometimes in partnership with neighboring nonprofits, UNI has reclaimed vacant lots, led blight removal, redeveloped public areas into parks and gardens, and created thriving spaces like LOS HQ,
a community center designed and led by young people.
Through UNI’s Southwest Urban Mural Project,
young artists in the community have designed and executed over 100 murals commissioned by residents and businesses to beautify local spaces. It has also launched youth-run initiatives like
Southwest Rides, the neighborhood’s first bike shop.
“The founding executive director really laid out the vision for the organization of both focusing on people and place,” says Bell, “so that while the built environment was being invested in, there were opportunities for people to invest in themselves and learn new skills and grow and build strong social networks.”
Listening to and building with the community
Bell was UNI's second full-time hire in 2007. The nonprofit was founded in 1997 by parishioners from All Saints Church as a way to serve the local community. Initially, it provided after-school programs, adult education at its neighborhood center, and summer programming at its adjacent park, Springwells Green.
Bell was tasked with scaling youth programming and expanding the organization’s reach in her initial role. She heard parents say they wanted their neighborhood schools to be central spots to congregate and receive resources. Working parents expressed the need for after-school enrichment to reach their children without additional transportation. She understands this even more today, with children of her own.
“I'm a parent now, and I actually found great joy when I was on sabbatical, and I got to sit outside and talk with parents. It's a time in your life when you need that.” she says.
“The people who live here go to school here, and that creates a sense of community that is different because kids and parents see each other at school, and they come home, and they're [together] in the neighborhood.”
Springwell's array of school choices is a strength of the neighborhood. Several DPSCD elementary and middle schools are in and just outside the neighborhood. Nearby Southwest Detroit options include the Academy of the Americas PK-12 dual language immersion program, Cesar Chavez Academy K-12 Public Charter Schools, Holy Redeemer Grade School, and Detroit Cristo Rey High School.
“There's been an opportunity for us to bring in and provide programming,” Bell says. “And over time, our neighborhoods don't have this flux of opening and closing; we have feeder patterns. I think for neighborhoods, it's critical to have schools if you want families to live here.”
Today, UNI provides
after-school enrichment programming, homework help, and literacy support at Bennett Elementary School, Harms Elementary School, and Amelia Earhart Elementary-Middle School. Bell says there’s been headway in the local schools, but “there were times when they couldn’t offer music and art and things critical for children's development on a consistent basis,” and UNI “tried to fill those gaps, and the desires of parents and students.”
The organization now employs between 18 and 21 full-time and 32 part-time employees and serves about 2,000 children and young adults. In addition, it has created eight employment programs for youth to get their first jobs and contribute to the local economy while hiring over 240+ youth ages 14-24 in the summer. These internal career pathways as UNI calls them include tracks in culinary skills, care and beautification of green spaces, research and program evaluation,
entrepreneurship skills via bike and skateboard retail, youth development, and more.
Through UNI’s community development initiatives, young people design and execute murals, care for four acres of land, and lead community engagement to learn how residents want to transform public spaces. They also develop site plans for lots and implement them. Bell refers to the Whittaker Street lot, a former dumping spot that young people in the neighborhood have transformed with raised beds, community gardens, and a water retention system.
Some of the participants in UNI's internal career pathways have gone on to work for the city and local foundations and even returned to leadership positions at the nonprofit, such as the organization’s murals art project coordinator and director of mental health and wellness. Bell’s excited to see where the neighborhood’s young people go next and how they influence other city spaces.
Neighborhood transformation through collaboration
When Bell talks about how Springwells has changed through the years, community partners like the Southwest Detroit Business Association (SDBA), Grace In Action, Inside Southwest, and Southwest Solutions come to mind, to name a few.
“Lawndale was a very, very different street when I first started working here. There was a funeral home and a couple of vacant buildings and houses,” she says. “It's been really cool to watch that street transform.”
On Lawndale,
Grace in Action has redeveloped the shuttered funeral home into a place of worship, education, enrichment, and training that allows
Southwest Detroit community members—particularly youth—to learn skills, develop relationships, and share creative spaces. Offerings include screen printing, graphic design, digital literacy, and language justice. UNI recently partnered with the nonprofit on a childcare collective.
Just steps away, UNI is developing the former Masonic Moose Lodge, which closed in 2012, into The Lawndale Center. On one side, LOS HQ houses the nonprofit’s youth employment and apprenticeship programs. With just a $200,000 gap in funding, Bell hopes construction for Southwest Rides storefront and cafe (
Bikes y Bedidas) will begin by July. The other side of the building houses office space and the
Southwest Detroit Community Justice Center, a community court with a restorative approach.
As for Springwell’s business district, Bell says it’s always been strong. Residents can get everything they need without leaving the neighborhood, she says. She credits this to the entrepreneurial spirit of residents and the Southwest Detroit Business Association (SDBA), which is working to
dismantle barriers for hundreds of business owners.
Shops, restaurants, and homeowners have also added to Springwell's landscape by investing in and maintaining their properties. Bell points to the exciting renovations and enhancements Taqueria "La Palapa" and Mangonadas Del Barrio on Lawndale have made in recent years. The neighborhood also has a new butcher shop.
“It's actually very magical to see what happens with public and private investment and how it can transform. That transformation started a while ago with SDBA but really picked up right before COVID-19 and during COVID-19.”
Many buildings, residential garages, and public spaces have seen beautification through UNI’s mural program and
Inside Southwest Detroit, promoting youth and community development through cultural and place-based initiatives. The organization has done large-scale murals with local and international artists and is a key organizer for Southwest’s annual Blessing of the Lowriders.
In addition to visual, meaningful art in the community, blight removal has been transformational for the neighborhood, Bell says. Along with other neighborhood organizations, UNI partnered with LISC Detroit in 2012 to pilot the city’s White Picket Fence Program
that allowed residents in Southwest to purchase blighted, vacant lot, which became the Land Bank Side Lot program. UNI has also done its own vacant lot reclamation.
“Just thinking about certain lots that got dumped on, and they don't have any dumping on them anymore, what it means to residents not to see blight,” Bell says. “It's traumatic. It reminds you that people don't care. And that's not to say that there's no blight, but cleaning the blight is hugely impactful for anybody that lives here.”
Challenges ahead; work and care continue
While Bell draws encouragement from community organizations and residents working together to enrich life in Springwells, the neighborhood still faces real challenges. Most recently, a flash flood caused by a water main break on the morning of Feb. 17 displaced hundreds of residents in below-freezing temperatures. See sidebar.
While the community works to address residents’ immediate needs caused from the water main break, Bell says this emergency raises a continual conversation about environmental issues in Southwest. There are serious environmental concerns where the water main break occurred, and, she says, a common practice to mitigate soil toxins is not to disrupt the area. She and other groups are concerned about the cascading effects of this disruption of soil toxins.
Before the flooding and the recent change in the White House Administration, Bell’s most significant concerns for the community and UNI’s work included funding instability, the persistence of the digital divide, and growing property crime, which she says is a result of the gentrification happening on the other side of the neighborhood around the Michigan Central Station campus.
“When you think about development, it is pretty inequitable. The places that need the most subsidy do not normally get it, and development here still needs a lot of subsidy, no matter where it's going,” says Bell. Not knowing what this administration will do and how federal dollars will get spent in the development space “is a big concern,” she says.
Safe, quality, affordable housing is high on residents' priority lists, and UNI aims to address this challenge through collaborative efforts and community engagement. The nonprofit is part of a group of organizations that are profoundly thinking about and working together on this, including the Detroit Housing Commission, SDBA, fellow Southwest Detroit nonprofits, the Congress of Communities and Bridging Communities, and mission-driven lender IFF.
“There's going to be some really exciting work that comes out of that because we've all been doing a lot of learning together for the last seven years, specifically around affordable housing and models,” Bell says. “I’m really grateful for the learning we've done and the foundations that have helped us work more closely together on bigger, heavier challenges.”
With President Donald Trump’s changes to immigration policy and uncertainty about how the new policies and directives for
mass deportations will play out, Bell is fearful for the security and health of her community and worried about how scared residents are.
“Are we going to have a neighborhood?” she asks tearfully. “We have people whose parents are leaving and leaving them here. There's no way to know who is going to be impacted. The people are so important here.”
She says the flooding showed that local “Know Your Rights” efforts are working because many residents did not open their doors for police who were trying to help them evacuate. She’s thankful that people are learning how they can protect themselves if confronted by ICE, but she grieves to see how the community cannot trust their local municipalities in a crisis.
It’s the community-based organizations have been instrumental in getting to families to support and respond to what they need, she says, and this relational work and trust building with community will continue. Focusing on physical spaces is often tempting in community development, but buildings are just bricks and mortar, she says, and you cannot disconnect a neighborhood from its people.
“One of the things that makes Southwest is this spirit of what this country is about, or supposed to be about, which is that you can build something beautiful for yourself and your family if you work hard to do it.”
“I’ve been challenged here,” Bell says. “I now know what it's like to be in a place for a long time, and while I can say there have been highs and lows…I've also learned that there are things the community very much still needs, even though a funder has decided that's not what we're doing anymore. It doesn't mean the need goes away.”
Resilient Neighborhoods is a reporting and engagement series examining how Detroit residents and community development organizations work together to strengthen local neighborhoods. It's made possible with funding from The Kresge Foundation.