More than a million people have fled the city of Detroit during the last half century.
But some University of Michigan students, who participated in the inaugural installment of the Semester in Detroit program, don’t want to leave upon completion of the winter 2009 term.
As a result, five of them will spend the next four months in the Motor City, working internships with community-based, nonprofit organizations. Another will intern with Gleaners Community Food Bank. And three more are making efforts to extend their stay.
“There are severe problems in Detroit,” said Jenna Utter, a Livonia native who has spent the semester interning at Alternatives for Girls. “But I want to do whatever it is that I can to affect change in community building.”
Utter, one of six students who were granted an AmeriCorps internship, will work with local youth at the Matrix Theatre Company over the summer.
Craig Regester, the program’s associate director and a Detroit resident, wasn’t expecting such a yearning from students to stay in the city after the program’s completion, at least this early in the program.
“I thought about this for next year,” he said. “It kind of caught us a bit by surprise, but it’s one of those good surprises.”
Of the students, many are native to southeast Michigan; one is from Uruguay and another grew up in the Fenkell and Dexter area on the city’s westside.
Reed is interning at the Detroit Urban League, where she helps teens in the Detroit Public School system with college preparation. Although some of the students are doing what they can to stay in Detroit this summer, she will be back in Ann Arbor taking classes.
We’re not in Ann Arbor anymore
Salam Rida spent her entire life just a few miles north of Detroit, but she didn’t know much about the city responsible for the mass production of the automobile, the Allies’ victory in World War II, and the entire world ‘Dancing in the Street.’
The Oak Park native came to Detroit for sporting events and parties but had never immersed herself in Michigan’s largest city.
But since January, she has been taking in everything Detroit has to offer. And now she doesn’t want to leave.
“Honestly, it’s going to be a really hard transition for me to go back to Ann Arbor,” Rida said. “I feel like I’ve already established so many connections here within the city, both working for WDET, and working with community members, and just basically meeting people around the city.
”I have so much established, and I feel slightly more connected here than I do in Ann Arbor.”
Rida is looking for employment in the city, because she hopes to return in late May and spend the summer here after a backpacking trip in Europe.
Although Rida has fallen love with Detroit, she admits the city isn’t exactly a perfect place, especially if you are trying to find things such as pizza in the wee hours of the night.
“I called about 13 places within the area and none of them were open, and it was like 1:30 in the morning,” she said. “People are still awake during that time, and I’m a college student, and it was a Friday night. It was just really stunning to me. I’m so used to there being constant access to things.”
More than just an interesting classroom
Regester, a Grand Rapids-area native, first came to Detroit as part of the Alternative Spring Break program while a student at U of M in February 1993.
In the summer of 1995, he landed a job with a local nonprofit and has been a resident ever since, later earning his master’s in teaching from Wayne State.
While the students are having a wonderful time living, working and studying in the city, Regester wants to make sure the community benefits from Semester in Detroit, as well.
“More and more folks in this world of service learning are trying to be able to prove — probably first and foremost to ourselves, but also to lots of other people — that there’s real, measurable community impact behind this work,” he said.
“I wouldn’t be really bummed that a lot of students learned things, because I think that’s important. But I’d be really bummed if it were mainly just using a place like Detroit for a much richer, more interesting classroom. I don’t think that anybody has that desire. I know nobody does.
“It is going to be very important for our program, over time, to be able to point to impact, changes, things that we can say,‘If it were not for the program, these things didn’t happen.’”
Lester Monts, senior vice provost for academic affairs at U of M, has been a key supporter of the program since its inception, calling Semester in Detroit a “win-win situation” for both the city and the university.
Eventually, Monts wants to change the program from its current, every-other-semester format, as it is now slated, to every semester. He also wants to expand the concept to include similar programs in other communities across Michigan.
“My hope is that in subsequent years, we have students doing this kind of work in Saginaw, in Grand Rapids, in Benton Harbor,” Monts said. “There’s a lot of work being done on college and university campuses having to do with engagement, and the best way for us to engage our public is through our students.”
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