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Press
Article Index:

• Flyp Media Interview
• Hope District: True community development spreads one block at a time
• Hope Lives Here
• Growing Green In Detroit: A rust belt city discovers the benefits of urban gardening
Flyp Media Interview



Read full story at www.flypmedia.com.

Hope District:
True community development spreads one block at a time

By Eric T. Campbell
The Michigan Citizen
 Mike Wimberly / ERIC CAMPBELL PHOTO
DETROIT — The philosophy driving development of the Hope District comes from a teaching that Mike Wimberly took to heart during a lecture on urban redevelopment —start on one corner, or one block, and don’t move until you’ve touched everything.

A chain of revitalized property on East Forest going east of Van Dyke has benefited from Wimberly’s adherence to this credo. He and the community around him have taken a grassroots initiative and created a point of reference for the area.

Centered in a building dubbed the Club Technology resource center, the Hope District spread as a way to make the community self-reliant and stem the tide of economic depression.

Projects devoted to food security, collective entrepreneurship, and spiritual healing are in various states of development along a corridor marked with colorful murals and maturing fruit trees.

“Our whole job is to create a place where people can become who they are in the community,” Wimberly told the Michigan Citizen during a recent tour.

Areas like the Little Egypt open-air market give residents an opportunity to buy and sell locally made products. An adjacent bus stop acts as a resource center and a point of sale for neighborhood merchants who offer homemade jewelry, purses or food items.

Kitty corner to the market is the Butterfly Dream Garden. Surrounding a corner lot are billboards decorated with painted honeycombs.

Residents are encouraged to share, in writing, their thoughts, hopes and concerns. On one, a neighborhood mother wrote a poem dedicated to her son, Lorenzo King, who was killed in March of 2007. In the middle of the circle sits a fire pit under construction—another location designed for locals to share stories and experiences.

According to Mike’s mother and co-collaborator, Lily Wimberly, these platforms are offered to encourage the facilitating of good memories—a first step in rediscovering the hope that has been lost in many urban cities.

“We want to bring back some happy, stable memories that people can pivot from,” Wimberly says. “It has to do with memories of your grandparent’s garden and the pot on the stove, which came right from the garden.”

Lily Wimberly founded the non-profit Friends of Detroit and Tri-County organization in 1994 as a way to rehabilitate local housing and commercial properties. Her efforts led to the forming of Club Technology, now a resource and meeting center for residents who wish to learn a new skill or become involved with neighborhood initiatives.

Lily says that the Hope District originated out of meetings held at Club Technology and trying to figure out what community needs were not being met and why.

The Hope District is designed to visually inspire those who choose to get involved. A stunning Egyptian-influenced mural by air-brush artist, Brian Gavin, decorates the side of a soon-to-be-opened storefront. A painting on a small billboard called “Miracle Park” can be seen form the road in addition to small paintings and artwork which mark all the garden plots.

But the prominent feature of the District is the abundance of resources devoted to fresh food and green space.

The “Peace Zone for Life” is a wooded sanctuary designed partly by activist Ron Scott for reflection and, eventually, live entertainment. The “Cultivating Coping” area has been planted with Box Elder, Hedge Maple, Bir Oak and Eastern Red Bud trees. It serves as place to settle disputes. Behind a row of trees, across an alley, sits a small field on the corner of Maxwell and Willard dotted with raised vegetable beds overflowing with cabbage, kale, tomatoes, and onions.

Master gardeners who volunteer as part of the gardening extension program at Michigan State University frequently tend the sculpted lots. Early in 2006, they put together a garden, which incorporates plants that were described in a journal by French explorer Antoine Cadillac in the early 1700’s. An artist’s depiction of Cadillac oversees a 30-foot herb wheel at the entrance of the garden, which will support medicinal varieties such as lemon balm, lavender and strewing herb.

Lily Wimberly estimates that 60-70% of the neighbors within range of the Hope District have at one time, actively involved themselves in a project or a meeting. She’s now starting to hear the stories from residents that the Hope District was meant to inspire—stories that start and end in the community.

“It’s an enthusiasm that you can feel and you can hear,” says Lily, “through stories about their gardens.”

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Hope Lives Here
By Larry Gabriel
Metro Times

Mike Wimberley stood with a pickax in his hand as he looked over a vacant lot on Baldwin Street. He wore a pair of insulated coveralls and a hooded sweatshirt against the Saturday morning November cold. A group of student volunteers from the University of Michigan scurried around this and a nearby lot planting some 170 fruit trees and bushes donated by the Michigan State University Extension Service. Not even big enough to be called saplings, the plum, peach, blueberry, pecan, pear and apple plants look like sticks poking out from the ground in weeded lots. They could be switches your grandmother would send you out to gather so she could tan your hide.

Across the street from the lot, a boarded-up house sports a sign: For Sale, $500 down, minimum $295 a month. It's typical of the east side neighborhood near Van Dyke and Forest — boarded-up houses, empty lots — the look of desperation.

Then, as Wimberley takes me up the street to tour the area, a woman leans out of her upstairs window and hollers, "Good morning, Mike." He greets her and replies affirmatively when she asks if he'll be at church on Sunday. The exchange softens the hard feel of the surroundings. The personal warmth makes it seem more a neighborhood, a community.

Indeed, it is. They call it the Hope District, a self-help community, along East Forest between Mt. Elliott and Cadillac. The Hope District is a project of the Friends of Detroit and Tri County, a nonprofit with the mission to provide human services, vocational skills training, life management skills and an improved quality of life to inner-city residents. Wimberley has been associated with the group since its beginning in 1994; he's been executive director since 2002.

It's obvious why people in this community need hope. But it's not pie-in-the-sky hope the Friends are selling here. In a Detroit that's facing economic hardship beyond the national challenges, and beyond the depressed state economy, it's about taking things into your own hands. Even in Detroit, this is one of the tougher areas. It's not on the list of seven neighborhoods the city has designated for saving in its Next Detroit program. South of here, along the Jefferson corridor, Indian Village with its mansions and English Village with its newly built $300,000 condos behind St. John Hospital are islands of stability in a roiling sea of economic devastation. If and when the economy gets better, those areas will feel relief first. The Hope District may never get significant development dollars or attention from any government or foundation source.

"The system as we know it doesn't work for us," says Wimberley. "We've got to have articulate pushback against the system, not belligerent. We're in a five-year campaign to transform ourselves."

They have taken possession of vacant lots, cleaned them up and reconfigured them for positive activities. One lot is called the Butterfly Dream Garden: Brightly painted tires create a butterfly-wing effect on either side of a central path cars sometimes cut across. Placards are mounted on poles for locals to write their dreams for themselves and the community. Kitty-corner to the Butterfly Dream Garden is a lot named Little Egypt, next to Zion Hope Missionary Baptist Church. Little Egypt is an open-air market for grassroots commerce. There is a wooden stage near the back of the lot for performances. They've added a table behind the bus stop bench along Van Dyke for the convenience of people waiting for the bus. Farther up Forest, a lot designated Miracle Park has a prayer circle and pathways forming a peace sign. There's a peace zone for life-coping skills. Fruit trees are planted there and on other lots in the area that also have vegetable gardens.

"We've got to produce something," says Wimberley. "We're too busy consuming. That's going out of the world backwards. Urban farming means nothing unless you can sell something."

That's where the Friends of Detroit's 2,300-square-foot facility at 8230 E. Forest comes in. There's a fully equipped, licensed commercial kitchen there for culinary arts training. Seven sewing machines and a couple of irons sit in a corner of the main office, and six computers are spread around the room. These things speak to Wimberley's obsession with finding a way to generate skills and ways to earn money. They also speak to his frustration.

"We've got plenty of muscle power," he says. "But machines can do that. We need the intellectual power, the ideas, to make this work."

There are smaller rooms in the building that might house classrooms, clinics or some enterprise as things develop. But right now they sit empty and unheated as activities are kept mainly to one large central room. What money the organization has comes from donations and fledgling business activities. Partnerships with universities such as U-M and Lawrence Tech, and organizations such as the Boggs Center, where Wimberley sits on the board of directors, provide some of the ideological and intellectual grounding. Most of the work is done by volunteers.

The Hope District is a big undertaking. There are many grassroots efforts around Detroit neighborhoods with similar concerns, but Friends of Detroit and Tri County is obviously further along than others. It seems to be making a difference along a few blocks radiating out from the East Forest and Van Dyke intersection. It's got to be a tough struggle just to maintain that, let alone advance its sphere of impact.

There's a long-term vision at work here. You don't plant orchards expecting them to bloom this year or next. You plant trees when you are looking far into the future. It takes long-term care and hard work to see your efforts bear fruit.


I've written about Detroiters' lack of access to good, nutritional food and the efforts of some to create more opportunities before. Here's another enterprise early enough in its formative stages that you have an opportunity to have an impact on what direction it takes. The MOSES Supermarket Task Force, a coalition of various groups, is organizing to create a community grocery store.

"Our hope is to come up with a model and process to address food access issues," says Brad Wilson, statewide community development director for the United Food and Commercial Workers union, which is partnering with MOSES on this. "At the end of this process we want everybody to be able to say this is our store, not a Kroger."

The nature of the store — food co-op, worker-owned store or whatever — is yet to be determined. So far the coalition has created three committees: a management search, a location search and a group dedicated to getting people to come to the meetings. The next meeting will be on Dec. 9, at St. Cecilia Church on Livernois Avenue near Grand River. Registration is at 6 p.m. with the meeting at 6:30 p.m.

"It's probably going to take a couple of years," says Wilson. "The community will help determine what it's going to be. You've got to look at what people want in a grocery store. What would you buy? What would your neighbors buy? Not food they don't want or can't afford. What about jobs? We would love it to be community owned, or employee owned, to have community stock ownership in play."

There are a lot of questions here. You might provide the answer.

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Growing Green in Detroit
A Rust Belt city discovers the benefits of urban gardening.
By Olga Bonfiglio| Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor/ August 21, 2008 edition

Megan Kohn was watering the neighborhood garden in Romanowski Park when 8-year-old Saba and her friend Alea came by to see what was going on.

After the girls asked to help, Megan directed them to get trowels out of her red truck parked 11 raised garden beds away.

As the trio cleared a bed for planting seedlings, Saba said, I love gardening, It's cool. It's nice. And you can get your hands dirty without getting yelled at. You get to plant things and when they grow, you pick them. 

Such interaction between kids and adults is one reason that Ms. Kohn, an urban agriculture apprentice for the Greening of Detroit (www.greeningofdetroit.com), is encouraging families in the neighborhood to come to the garden to work, visit, and harvest fresh produce.

Another reason is that she and others see such urban gardens  355 of them so far, planted throughout the 139-square-mile city  as vital to the revitalization of Detroit, often called a rusted out industrial city.

Food is essential to daily life, says Ashley Atkinson, director of urban agriculture for the Greening of Detroit, which started in 1989 as a reforesting program for the city's neighborhoods, boulevards, and parks.

Today, with 25 percent of the land in the city vacant due to the removal of many residential and commercial buildings, Ms. Atkinson has been instrumental in developing gardening and youth education programs to help stabilize and redevelop neighborhoods.

We have a good model, she says. People are coming across the country to see what Detroit is doing. 

The success of Detroit 's urban gardens is more than just food production, however. It's about connecting people and restoring their confidence so that they can rebuild their neighborhoods. We build relationships before we do soil tests, says Atkinson. That ensures that the gardens are scaled correctly and not too overwhelming to the people who will work on them. 

The Hope District is one example of how the project works. Located at a four-corner bus stop, the Hope District comprises gardens, storefronts, a farm market, entertainment, and a skills training center.

The Peace Zone for Life, a small wooded area, was created as a place for neighbors to settle their conflicts.

The Cadillac Garden, dubbed in honor of Detroit 's founder, grows herbs while Miracle Park features a 24-hour prayer circle surrounded by 21 new fruit trees.

The Butterfly Dream Garden provides residents with a space to draw their dreams on small billboards and then work to make them happen.

Mike Wimberley has taken the lead on these efforts and enlisted the aid of 60 to 70 percent of the neighbors. He also rehabilitates local housing and commercial properties through Friends of Detroit and Tri-County, a nonprofit organization that his mother, Lily Wimberley, founded in 1994.

What we're doing is to start with one block, and we don 't dare move until we take care of that one block, he says.

Another key ingredient to the city 's gardening success is Earthworks, founded in 1997 by Rick Samyn of the Capuchin Soup Kitchen (www.cskdetroit.org) on Detroit 's East Side.

Brother Rick noticed that the poor were buying their food at gas stations, and kids were calling Coke and chips a meal. He began a small garden in a vacant lot and two years later developed six other lots by removing debris and regenerating the soil with compost.

The gardens now supply food for the Capuchin Soup Kitchen, which prepares 2,000 meals per day, and the Gleaners Community Food Bank (www.gcfb.org/site/PageServer), which distributes 25 million pounds of food each year.

Four years ago, Earthworks added a 1,300-square-foot greenhouse that produces more than 100,000 vegetable seedlings for family, community, and school gardens across the city.

However, gardening is not just an economic or a community-building asset. It s considered therapeutic and healing, especially for urban children who often live in a violent and unsafe world.

The toughest children derive a sense of pleasure and accomplishment by growing plants, says Sister Nancyann Turner, manager of the youth program at the soup kitchen.

She provides classes in gardening, cooking, and the arts in addition to offering tutoring services and a children's library.

Gardening stretches their imagination and stirs their spirits, she adds. They are less violent, and there is less crime. 

More than 200 children per week participate during the school year, and 50 to 60 kids sign up for summer programs that include a Peacemaking Camp.

Gardening provides the children with active entertainment where they build and create something out of nothing, says Sister Nancyann, who sees it as an alternative to the passive entertainment of television and video games.

It's so important in a world that is so wounded not to lose our sense of awe and wonder, she says. The children were amazed at the eight-foot sunflowers they planted from seeds. 

The urban garden movement began in Detroit in 1992 when Jimmy and Grace Lee Boggs, local labor and civil rights activists, envisioned a different future for the city since it was clear that industrialization was gone forever.

They founded Detroit Summer (www.detroitsummer.org), a multiracial, intergenerational collective that works to transform citizens and their communities by confronting problems with creativity and critical thinking.

Actually, it was a blessing that Detroit no longer had the illusion of expansion, says Mrs. Boggs, now in her 90s. You can bemoan your fate or, as the African-American elders taught, you can plant gardens. 

As the garden movement caught on in the city, partnerships developed among people and organizations and became known as the Detroit Agricultural Network (DAN).

Each summer for the past 11 years, DAN has held a two-hour bus and bicycle tour to show off the community gardens to the public and to demonstrate how gardens are influencing larger issues such as reducing crime, cleaning up trash-strewn lots, connecting people to nature, nurturing leadership in citizens of all ages, and improving property values.

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