Work, reimagined: Detroit gets creative

How residents of Detroit, America?s most famously down and out city, are building livelihoods that also rebuild their communities.

For nearly a decade, Gloria Lowe was a final-line inspector for Ford Motor Company, checking new Mustangs as they rolled off an assembly line in Dearborn, Mich. She worked at the River Rouge Complex, a hulking, mile-long structure that, back in the 1930s, employed as many as 100,000 people.

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By the time Gloria started working there, just a fraction of the workers remained. (Since the year 2000, metropolitan Detroit has lost about 200,000 manufacturing jobs, despite experiencing a slight gain since 2009.)

Then one day, in 1999, Gloria was on her way back into the plant after parking yet another Mustang when an automated, two-thousand pound metal door came loose and crashed down on her head. She was diagnosed with left-side nerve damage from the top of her brain down through her feet, and later, with PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder.

?What image do you have in your mind about Detroit? Do you see only empty lots and abandoned buildings, and trash all over the place? Or do you see the empty lots as we who live there see them ? as opportunities?"

?I was told by my doctors that I would never work again. I was only 50 years old. I didn?t know what it meant not to work,? Gloria recalls.

She was able to find a part-time job at a law firm, helping military veterans apply for aid and benefits. During those consultations, she listened to the stories of dozens of veterans, most of them men, who ?were lost and didn?t know what to do,? says Gloria.

So she started asking herself what she could do to help. Over and over, Gloria asked them, ?What kinds of skills do you have?? More often than not, they?d tell her they used to be carpenters in their former lives, or woodworkers, roofers, plumbers, electricians.

When she heard this, Gloria began looking at Detroit with new eyes. These men, she thought, were like the more than 33,000 vacant, sometimes blighted, homes in her city. They have good foundations; they just needed some fixing up. And maybe they could help each other.

And so began We Want Green Too, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to ?re-educate, re-train, and re-build a 21st century, sustainable Detroit.? Gloria is working to assemble various teams with all the basic skills to make crumbling homes liveable: dry walling, painting, floor repair, and so on.

In addition to veterans, she?s finding craftsmen among former prison inmates, recovering addicts, and other un- or underemployed Detroiters.

?You have people who are challenged, they don?t have jobs. Why not make their jobs re-structuring their own communities?? says Gloria.

We Want Green Too is just one of many ways that Detroiters are working to take their city?s future into their own hands ? to create livelihoods more sustainable than those that have disappeared. As Gloria continues to work on the housing end, her friends and neighbors are busy growing a local, sustainable food system (there are now over 1,600 farms and gardens in Detroit, producing over three tons of food annually, nurturing a new education paradigm, and creating social enterprises that build community and capital).?

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/a4_P8MbHx3M/Work-reimagined-Detroit-gets-creative

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