News

Featured UIX innovator Jordi Carbonell, owner of Cafe Con Leche in SW Detroit, blogs about the importance of shared spaces for Huffington Post Detroit:

"Businesses are central in creating the spaces that make Detroit unique. It's there where we see our neighbors and friends. It's here where we buy our goods and get our services. It's here we see each other in the daily tasks of life. Memories are made in these spaces. We see each other and discover what we need to do to continue the tapestry of our community. This is where we announce to the world who we are by defining our space through our businesses, which help us make this place our own."

Read the full article here. Then watch Jordi's video interview with DETROIT LIVES! here.

Challenge Detroit has narrowed its applicant list to 100 young people and it wants your help whittling it down from there.

The talent attraction program received 900 applicants for its initial year where a few dozen young people will be given living grants, jobs and social opportunities in Detroit in an effort to get more talented leaders to sink roots in the city. The organizers narrowed that initial list to 100 semi-finalist and wants to social media users to help determine which ones make it to the final selection process in May.

"It's an important way to engaging the community early on," says Deirdre Greene, director of The Collaborative Group, which is organizing the the Challenge Detroit program. "We want the community to be an important part of the organizations."

Challenge Detroit will offer 30 grants to young people that will cover living expenses (a $500 per month stipend), employment (a job with a local company), social experience (coordinated activities within the group and the communities the grant recipients live in) and giving back through monthly team challenges.

The top 50 finalists will interview for the 30 grants, which will be awarded this summer. Applicants need a bachelor's degree but don't necessarily have to be fresh college graduates. Any young people with innovative, entrepreneurial ambitions for Detroit that want to sink roots in the city could apply.

"It's been a really tough process," Greene says. "There have been some amazing individuals."

Source: Deirdre Greene, director of The Collaborative Group
Writer: Jon Zemke

Detroit social entrepreneurs are repositioning the nation's geographic emphasis on Silicon Valley, attracting a business incubator at Wayne State, a venture capital fund based out of U of M, and the attention of tech wizards and venture capitalists on the West Coast.

At the Blackstone LaunchPad incubator at Wayne State, a diverse group of student entrepreneurs are being trained in running a business -- and locating those future companies in Metro Detroit is part of the program. And they're inspired by young social entrepreneurs like En Garde! Detroit's Bobby Smith and Veronika Scott of the Empowerment Plan to do more than just pay the bills.

Smith tells Xconomy his long-term goal is to help transform Detroit into the "Silicon Valley of social entrepreneurship. Detroit is the perfect place for it -- Detroit created the middle class. People here are not afraid of hard work."

Read more here.

We're happy whenever Detroit doers get their due in the national media. This time it was during a caffeinated discussion on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" about how innovation is changing the social landscape in the Rust Belt, with a special nod to Corktown. This conversation was fueled by a forthcoming article in the April issue of Details Magazine, recently previewed by our friends at Curbed Detroit. Watch the clip here.

We're always happy to read national press on CCS alum Veronika Scott, who was featured in Model D's IdeaLab speaker series in January. This time the words attached to her good deeds come courtesy of The New York Times. Here's an excerpt: 

Having graduated this past December, Ms. Scott has now founded the Empowerment Plan, a nonprofit company, where she is training and paying recently homeless women to produce the coats for those living on the streets. Already they have made 275 coats -- 100 of which have been given to homeless people in Detroit and two of which Ms. Scott gave to Occupy Wall Street supporters she met while visiting New York this winter.

Read the rest of it here.

Frustrated by recent cuts to the city's bus service, some Detroiters get mad and others get even -- with innovative solutions. An example of the latter was picked up recently by The Atlantic Cities. Here's an excerpt:

Earlier this year Andy Didorosi, a young entrepreneur and lifetime Detroiter, decided he'd heard enough. In January he bought three buses and began to organize the Detroit Bus Company — a private transit operation he hopes can pick up where the city's bus system has left off. The company is completing its regulatory papers now and expects to start service in late April.

"If people can't get anywhere, the city doesn't work," Didorosi says. "As Detroiters we're just frustrated as hell. This is my small effort to put something back together. Maybe we'll bring some innovation to the market and move forward as a city."

Detroiters Rishi Jaitly of the Knight Foundation and Amy Kaherl of Detroit SOUP headed to Austin, Texas earlier this month to share their work at SXSW.

"One big question we constantly ask as we think about community grantmaking is how do we go from pockets of impact to real strategic change?” Jaitly posed the question during a discussion focused on the new face of philanthropy and community grantmaking, and how it can best engage new people to contribute to local projects.

For more on Jaitly's answer, read on here.

For the full article, read here.

When the Detroit Free Press announced their partnership with UIX, they shared an idea worth repeating: When it comes to civic engagement and transformation, small-scale projects matter. Says Jewel Gopwani:

Think of the word innovation and it’s easy to think big: the assembly line, the Internet, the iPad. But shrink your scope a bit, and you’ll find innovators among the projects that are making an essential difference in Detroit.

Can you imagine a Detroit without Veronika Scott's Empowerment Plan, which gives self-heated waterproof coats to the city’s homeless? Or without Bobby Smith’s En Garde! Detroit, which teaches at-risk youths the sport of fencing and gives them the structure and confidence to go far in life?

Read the full article here.

What is your wish for The City 2.0? That's what the folks at TED, the global nonprofit devoted to "ideas worth spreading," want to know. Most years, they award the $100,000 TED Prize to an individual with "one wish to change the world." This year, they awarded it to an idea: the city of the future -- "a future in which more than ten billion people on planet Earth must somehow live sustainably."

Individuals are invited to register on their website (www.thecity2.org) and form cross-disciplinary groups to:

1. Determine the issue they want to tackle (i.e. traffic, lack of trees);
2. Collectively determine a solution;
3. Collaboratively develop an action plan;
4. Work to implement the solution;
5. Share the story of their success or failure with others.

Ten micro grants of $10,000 will be awarded in July 2012 to ten local projects that have the best hope of spurring the creation of their City 2.0.

Interested in forming a Detroit team and project? Read more here.