Christopher Burke - Mentoring Study
CEHHS
iGen Voices
This study explores students' perspectives on the types of mentoring, resources, and levels of support they want and need to reach academic and professional goals. The students being studied are currently mentored by BMe Community Leaders and the results will be shared in a public forum. Results will also inform the new Master Degree in Community Based Education (CBE).
Truman Hudson - Addressing Inequalities
CEHHS
A New Detroit: Metropolitan Leaders' Perspectives
This project seeks to assist Southeast Michigan leaders with addressing the question: What can be done to reduce regional educational and economic inequities? Despite the number of leadership development programs in the region that aim to empower future leaders with the skills necessary to manage the fiscal operations, few focus on developing approaches for addressing regional inequities in education and economics. This study looks at diverse perspectives of a group of leaders who received training in regional cultural competency and provides insight into ways in which to build a more educational and economically just community.
Carmel Price - Campus Food Pantries
CASL
College Campuses Unite to Address Food Insecurity Among Students
This study researches the emerging trend of campus food pantries. It supports bringing together campus food pantry organizers for a one-day event that is focused on addressing food insecurity among students. This event will served several purposes:
1. To share current research findings with campus pantry organizers, who are in the best position to benefit from this work.
2. Campus pantry organizers will have a unique opportunity to meet each other and network.
3. Campus pantry organizers will have an opportunity to further participate in this research through concept mapping and survey participation.
Joshua Akers - Speculative Property Ownership Mapping
CASL
Property in Practice: A Public Portal Mapping Detroit Speculative Ownership and Property Conditions (Renewal Request)
Community-Based Research
Property Praxis is a counter-speculation tool available to the public as well as community organizations contesting displacement and eviction. The website allows users to see ownership information and historical change in ownership over time in their neighborhood. This renewal will allow the expansion of geospatial analysis tool tracking in Detroit. That includes expansion of historical property data, expansion of the scope of the work and improvement of web architecture, and addition of other cities facing similar challenges.
Hani Bawardi - Arab American Oral History Project
CASL
Whither Arab Americans? Voices from Southeast Michigan (Renewal Request)
Community-Based Research
This funding will allow for the construction of a documentary based on wide collection of oral histories of Arab Americans. The first-hand narrative will outline prominent features of the Arab American saga in Southeast Michigan based on the recorded interviews. The recordings contain rare accounts from the first U.S.-born Arab Americans obtained by Bawardi over a twenty-five year period.
Danielle DeFauw - School Library Project
CEHHS
Bennett Elementary Library Project
Community-Based Project
Partnering with teachers, students, and staff of Bennett Elementary in Detroit, Michigan, CEHHS, Books for a Benefit, and Southwest Solutions, this project is a collaboration to develop Bennett Elementary's Pre-K-5 Library. This project focuses on high impact practices for student success as books form learning communities’ common intellectual experience. The books will also provide tools for teachers’ implementation of the Common Core State Standards. Once Bennett Elementary’s library is fully functioning, the partners hope to extend the project to other Detroit Public Schools.
Paul Draus - Violence Prevention
CASL
Violence Prevention as Community Health Work: Comparing Street Outreach Programs in Two Michigan Cities
Community-Based Research
This proposal seeks to compare two geographically focused approaches to reduce violence in urban communities using community outreach workers: one based in Detroit, and the other in Ypsilanti, MI. Featuring a diverse group of university, government and community-based collaborators: Paul Draus and Juliette Roddy of the University of Michigan-Dearborn, Stephen Wade of the Washtenaw County Public Health Department, Derrick Jackson of Washtenaw County Sheriff's Office, and Daryl Harris of CeaseFire Detroit, this proposal has a novel approach to integrating criminal justice and public health approaches to the problem of urban violence.
Julie Taylor - Mobile Museum Project
CEHHS
Mobile Museums and Community-Based History Education
Community-Based Project
This project explores the role and impact of mobile museums in community-based history education. Students at UM-Dearborn and Frederick Douglass Academy in Detroit will get the chance to explore the Black History 101 Mobile Museum. During this visit, they will get to see the potential of original artifacts to raise historical interest, awareness, and understanding.
Joshua Akers - Air Quality and Environmental Justice
Southwest Detroit is one of the most polluted zip codes in the state. Air quality is an issue with both diesel idling at the international bridge crossing and emissions from heavy industrial sectors south of this area. High rates of asthma are one outcome of these conditions. This project addresses this environmental justice issue by providing real time air quality information to community members to build awareness of the issue and to generate the data necessary to encourage greater action by elected officials and policymakers. Grace in Action Collective/Radical Productions and the UM-Dearborn Urban Praxis Workshop will create a real time map for community members to access via their phones or home computer. The map will present data gathered from 10 DIY air sensors that Grace in Action and southwest high school students will be building this summer. This project leverages two ongoing initiatives in the community. One is a wireless mesh network that allows residents in this community free internet access. The other is an app built by high school students working with Grace in Action that allows residents to report air quality issues generated by truck idling. The Urban Praxis workshop intends to build the architecture for air quality data gathered by DIY sensors to be recorded for analysis and rendered in real time on an air quality map. Grace in Action intends to use the long term data to continue its partnerships with legislators and city councilors in Detroit. The real time map will be used to build community awareness of the issue, public health information, and organizing strategies.
Carmel Price and Natalie Sampson - Flooding as Health Policy and Social Justice
On August 11, 2014, Metro Detroit experienced record-breaking rainfall—more than 6” in 4 hours—which resulted in a federal disaster declaration and 1000’s of household claims to FEMA for recovery funds. In addition to this extreme event, however, recurrent household flooding is an underreported phenomenon that is particularly overlooked in non-coastal cities and may worsen with climate change. Thanks to previous support from ORSP, we conducted 20 qualitative in-depth interviews with residents experiencing repeated basement flooding throughout Detroit. We worked with community leaders to recruit residents that had severe household flooding during the 2014 event and in other instances since. We conducted thematic analyses in which two researchers coded each transcript. We found that snowball sampling yielded interviewees across the city in several neighborhoods not deemed high risk for flood events. Residents’ reported concerns related to chronic and infectious diseases, particularly for seniors and young children, as well as the long-term stress of repeated economic loss. Our results suggest ways for public health, emergency preparedness, urban planners and community leaders to work towards prevention (e.g., storm water management through green infrastructure, backflow devices) and adaptation to mitigate further health inequities. We are working with climate change leaders in Detroit to widely share our findings and move toward sustainable solutions. Climate change models project increasing frequency, duration and severity of precipitation events over the next thirty years in the Midwest U.S. Our findings are critical for cities, such as Detroit, as they manage the intersecting issues of climate change, aging infrastructure, and vacant land reuse.
Another key partner is Khalil Ligon, Community Sustainability Planner for the Alliance for the Great Lakes. We are working with Ligon to host a community event to disseminate information and engage community members and climate change leaders on the topic of flooding in Detroit. We anticipate sharing the following with workshop participants: 1) Our research data/results from the qualitative interviews we conducted 2) Things we learned from other communities/scholars while in Portugal 3) The data/analysis of Detroit flooding based on a collaboration with Sam Brody and Flood Forum USA.
Julie Taylor - Learning in 3D
This research project will involve avatar and 3D bust creation in social studies and English language arts education at the Douglass Academy for Young Men in Detroit. Avatar technologies are still emerging, and their use in educational settings has not been well studied. In this action-research project, an interdisciplinary team will explore learning in three dimensions. Papers will be published as peer-reviewed articles in scholarly journals for educators.
The students will engage in authentic writing assignments related to the technologies. The researchers will address critical research questions: a) Will the creation of avatars increase levels of student engagement?; b) How does three dimensionality enrich the learning experience?; c) How may avatars be used in authentic writing?; and d) How may avatars and 3D busts be used to advance students' understanding of memory and history?
Joshua Akers - Speculative Property Ownership Mapping
Property Praxis is web mapping and visualization tool for community organizations, community residents, and housing advocates working on issues of housing stability in Detroit.
This funding is for the expansion of our geospatial analysis tool tracking property speculation in Detroit. This funding will allow us to bring the project fully up-to-date and develop automation practices that will make this work more efficient. It will help complete the work on the 2018 data set and the 2019 data for the city. Over the past two years, this project has experienced both increased demand and attention while also addressing software and technology issues that required migrating to different platforms and identifying new platforms. These challenges make clear the need to develop robust systems within the university that will both stabilize the platform and allow us to provide up-to-date data to our community partners.
The research and development of the project has relied on the efforts of UM-Dearborn students and community members. This funding will allow for the dedication of students from the UM-Dearborn Social Science Research Lab to the project and to begin training new students to take on the work of those that are graduating.
Kent Murray - Reducing Health Impacts of Lead
High concentrations of lead found in the soil of southwest Detroit pose a significant public health risk to residents. This risk rises in significance for young children (2-6 years of age), the elderly, and to residents with respiratory illnesses in the Delray community. Recent laboratory-based research at UM-Dearborn has evaluated several soil additions that could potentially reduce the ability of lead to leach into the soil, thereby reducing its ability to reach people, particularly young children. One of these additions was applied to a property along Melville street with lead concentrations in excess of 400mg/Kg. During a three month period from early October through December 2018, soil lead bioaccessibility was reduced by 80%. The goal of this project is to expand this effort throughout the Delray community with the assistance of the community partner.
Rose Wellman - Addressing Health Disparities in Dearborn
The goal of this research project is to collect data in order to develop and implement culturally responsive, effective, and sustainable health improvement interventions that promote health equity in south and east Dearborn, a community with heightened health disparities. In collaboration with the Healthy Dearborn Research Team, a part of the Healthy Dearborn Coalition, a community coalition of over 400 community members that promotes health and wellness in Dearborn, and ACCESS, the largest social services agency serving Arab populations in the country, we will conduct focus groups with as many as 150 residents of Dearborn to address health disparities in our community.
