The Equitable Development Series explores how Detroit can grow in a way that allows people of all races, classes, and abilities to participate and benefit. The series includes stories published here in Model D as well as public events starting in August.
D4’s Equitable Development Series in partnership with Model D is made possible thanks to generous support from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the Knight Foundation Fund of the Community Foundation.
You've likely seen Tytiana "Ty" Steele's work without realizing it. The set designer and director is behind sumptuous scenes in TV shows like "Queen of the South" and brand campaigns like Barefoot Wine's We Stan with Her, but now the Detroit artist is bringing her talent back to her hometown, starting her own company to help build equity in her industry.
Located at the corner of East Jefferson Avenue and Lakewood Street in the city’s Jefferson Chalmers neighborhood is an old S.S. Kresge’s Five and Dime Department Store first built in 1926. The building is being redeveloped as the JEI Neighborhood Resource Hub, the new home for the organization’s Housing & Neighborhood Services team.
The pandemic, the reckoning on systemic racism, and the intersection of equity and solar energy are just a few things on our minds in 2021.
With 33 awards recognizing their efforts in supporting diverse businesses and communities, Henry Ford Health System has been a champion of minority- and women-owned businesses in Detroit for over two decades through a variety of policies and programs — from transportation services and office supplies to the construction of its buildings.
It's not just a design hub that Tanya Saldivar-Ali and her husband, Luis, are building on 18th Street — the Detroit couple is developing a construction pipeline to connect residents with sustainable careers. But it's the cutting-edge technology they are using to tell residents' stories that is capturing international attention.
Neighborhoods around Detroit are changing. And community development organizations across the city are trying to bring community members' voices into the conversation about what's happening.
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.’ "
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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