Detroit Catholic Pastoral Alliance
When was it organized?
We incorporated in 1990, but the work started after the riots in 1967.
Who is completing this survey? Name and role with organization:
John Thorne, Executive Director; Cleophus Bradley, Director of Community Development
Choose one category that best fits your organization:
Community Development Organization (not sponsored by a church or agency or company), but have churches that are members
Does your organization have paid staff?
- Yes, 3.
What is the annual budget of your organization?
$471,120
Describe the streets or locations that define your organization’s overall focus area (north, south, east and/or west):
- N — Gratiot to I94
- S — East Warren
- W — Rohns
- E — Cadillac Avenue
- These are our housing development boundaries, we do citywide work as well
Describe in detail the work your organization does, within the role categories below, along with the specific geographic area in which the work is done. Refer to the definitions below of the community development roles we are inquiring about. Include any partner organizations you work with, and how the work is funded or otherwise resourced. Use extra pages if necessary. If your organization doesn’t do work in one or more of the role categories, just skip that portion of the survey.
Please describe the work your organization does in community development:
Convening/Facilitating/Collaborations: General Description
- Block clubs and other residential groups meet at the DCPA Office site and the Gratiot Woods Senior CO-OP building. We also host the Gratiot Ave Business Association monthly meetings.
- Most of our programs are bigger than our geographical area focus. We have the Community Action Committee that pulls people together to talk about issues facing the city, including water shut offs, gentrification, senior displacement and schools. This looks at the City as a whole due to the member base.
You have to be patient. It’s challenging reaching out to people and making them feel that they need to come together and come to a meeting. We have learned to look for community leaders to enhance and expand community organizing efforts.
- We have a separate advisory board that meets bi-annually or twice a year. It consists of funders, builders and professionals: a health care industry worker, a banker, a community investor, a startup entrepreneur, a builder and a restauranteur. These are people who help us stay on task and focus on the bigger picture while our actual board is made up of the people from the parishes. The advisory board is like a networking board that helps them find money and solve problems.
Convening/Facilitating/Collaborations: Partner Organizations
- ECN
- 15 city wide churches
- Community Development Organizations
- MHT Housing
- CSI-CO-OP Senior Housing
- City of Detroit
Convening/Facilitating/Collaborations: Funders
- Sisters of St. Joseph’s
- Racine Dominicans
- Community Development Funding Institutions
- Banks
- City of Detroit
- State of Michigan
Convening/Facilitating/Collaborations: Important Outcomes or Lessons
Outcomes:
- Information sharing to assist the community. Resident participation in beautification projects, community clean-ups, and community playground building.
- Residents have been able participate in periodic community meetings to include City of Detroit representatives, Detroit neighborhood police officers, State representatives
- We also hear and understand the needs as we find ways to facilitate ways to bring the necessary people to the table.
- Our visual outcomes are the housing units that we’ve developed over the years that were able to transform lives and the psyche of people in the neighborhood.
Lessons:
- You have to be patient. It’s challenging reaching out to people and making them feel that they need to come together and come to a meeting. We have learned to look for community leaders to enhance and expand community organizing efforts.
- There’s strength in people coming together and always a need for more participation when it comes to community collaboration. There aren’t enough resources to support community organizing. When you convene with the community, you build a relationship with the community which is powerful as a community organizing tool.
Resident Engagement/Empowerment: General Description
- In the past, we’ve engaged residents through block clubs and focus groups to deal with projects that we’ve planned.
- Today, our resident engagement has been shared engagement and we’ve been part of another larger collaborative bringing block clubs together in different target areas. We come together to see what all the needs are and to decide how to make the community better. When I (Cleophus) started working we had about six block clubs and each street had a block club and there was a neighborhood coalition group. This was about 10–15 years ago. The people that were organizing those groups were older people who have passed on. Their offspring have moved on and there has not been a lot of involvement with the block clubs. Hopefully, new residents will move in with a willingness to improve the community. We now partner with a larger area of the City to get things done. In a neighborhood like ours, a better plan is to have a community coalition or a resident coalition that is not defined mostly by block clubs. We use LEAP’s boundaries for Resident Engagement/Empowerment (Alter Rd to Mt Elliott to Jefferson to 94).
- One LEAP board member is a resident from our development boundaries
Information sharing is a great outcome from resident engagement. It encourages neighborhood beautification and some public advocacy. It changes morale when the people come together and see what they can do. It defines and identifies leadership.
- We do community engagement with young people. It’s really a STEM program, but they renamed themselves. They are called the Tuskegee Spirits Youth Program, but they met up with some engineers from Ford and they decided that they wanted to do something on that end. They started a STEM program where they took the youth down to City Airport and they flew with some of the Tuskegee Airmen and they’re now the Tuskegee Spirits. They’re doing everything. Most of them are from the eastside area and it crosses over Gratiot and reaches the McCullough neighborhood. They’re doing everything from basic measurements to learning how to use tools and building rockets and go carts. Seeing the engagement of the young people is great. By time they graduate to the next level, you can see the growth. Many of them don’t know how to measure with a ruler. Watching their love grow for math and science is also rewarding because before they didn’t know what it was, how it works or what can be done with it. It’s important that young people feel important and valued in the community. It’s a challenge to help get volunteers, but we did get block grant money for it.
Resident Engagement/Empowerment: Partner Organizations
- LEAP
- McClellan Ave Block Club
- Belvedere Street United Youth Block Club
- Communities for Change Block Club
Resident Engagement/Empowerment: Funders
No specific funding. There’s not a lot of funding for community engagement and organizing and we have yet to pursue any sources.
Resident Engagement/Empowerment: Important Outcomes or Lessons
Outcomes:
Information sharing is a great outcome from resident engagement. It encourages neighborhood beautification and some public advocacy. It changes morale when the people come together and see what they can do. It defines and identifies leadership.
Lessons:
- There are very few leaders or organizers. There’s a need for more organizers and leaders.
- There are many ways to accomplish a goal.
Economic Development: General Description
- We’ve been Implementing affordable housing projects since 1997. We got started when the archdioceses closed. Thirty-three of 66 churches were closed in 1989. Once that happened, a lot of people were leaving the city. Around that time (1990), we became a 501(c)(3) so people felt the need to donate their house to us. We had about 5–10 houses all over the city. We started a lease/purchase program for families that needed housing. We got donations and three small loans to start rehabbing these houses. To get larger amounts of funding for housing rehab, the City and State advised us to focus on a target area to make an impact in the neighborhood. We picked the Gratiot Woods community (DCPA housing target geographical boundaries) and started applying to the City, State and Federal funding for minor home repair, land acquisition, development and resale of single-family homes.
- We have completed new construction, rehabilitation, owner occupied minor home repair of over 52 single family homes through the years.
Through the years, we’ve done 36 — 52 single family homes by either acquiring, developing and reselling them — that includes owner occupied minor home repair.
- Since the housing market crash, we’ve had to switch gears from single family housing development to commercial development. Those developments consist of residential and commercial space development at 6106 McClellan at Gratiot, 9200 Gratiot, 8900 Gratiot, and 9100 Gratiot.
- We’ve done neighborhood clean ups.
- We do tree planting, beautification work and gardens on a regular basis.
- We completed three mural art projects with Katie Yamasaki. Katie did a Trayvon Martin mural on I94 and Gratiot and inside Infinity Head Start Day Care Center I and II.
- We had plans to do a workshare/living unit across the street, but it never came to fruition.
Economic Development: Partner Organizations
- City of Detroit
- MHT Housing
- CSI Inc. CO-OP Services Inc. (specializing in senior home development)
- Nativity Church
- Brighter Detroit Community Center
- All DCPA member churches
- Community Organizations
- Community Residents
Economic Development: Funders
- State of Michigan
- City of Detroit
- Banks
- CDFIs—Community Development Funding Institutions
- IFF
- Invest Detroit
- Sisters of St. Joseph’s
- Sisters of Mercy
- Racine Dominicans
- Sisters of Charity
- Kresge
- Community Foundation
- Wayne County
- DTE
- GM Foundation
Economic Development: Important Outcomes or Lessons
Outcomes:
- Through the years, we’ve done 36 — 52 single family homes by either acquiring, developing and reselling them — that includes owner occupied minor home repair.
- We’ve done 22,000 SF of commercial space, 109 residential units, a community garden, and a neighborhood park.
Lessons:
There’s an increased need for decent, affordable housing for families. The need for rental housing has also increased over the years. We were in a unique situation because of the single family housing market crunch back in 2008. We went towards the commercial development side of it and hoped the commercial development along Gratiot would stir up residential development surrounding it. Which do you do first residential for commercial development or vice versa. We did both; commercial mixed with residential. The impact of commercial development along Gratiot Avenue can solidify the surrounding neighborhood behind it.
Resident Support: General Description
- We don’t have a typical human service program. People call all the time and then we direct them to the appropriate organizations — sometimes DTE, United Community Housing Coalition etc. A lot of the help that people need is directed towards housing i.e. help with their bills or help to find emergency housing.
- Epiphany is a literacy program of DCPA that’s located at the Samaritan Center at Conner and Warren. They take young people from grades 3–12 and they get one-on-one tutoring for English and math. You have the same tutor all the way through so they get to know, the young person’s strengths and weaknesses. They have their own director Roslyn Taylor and this year they had 22 students and 26 volunteers.
People don’t know how much power they have/ it’s hard for people to know how much power they have when it comes to getting things done. Sometimes just some direction and a tidbit of information create a path to power.
- We do community engagement with young people. It’s really a STEM program, but they renamed themselves. They are called the Tuskegee Spirits Youth Program, but they met up with some engineers from Ford and they decided that they wanted to do something on that end. They started a STEM program where they took the youth down to City Airport and they flew with some of the Tuskegee Airmen and they’re now the Tuskegee Spirits. They’re doing everything. Most of them are from the eastside area and it crosses over Gratiot and reaches the McCullough neighborhood. They’re doing everything from basic measurements to learning how to use tools and building rockets and go carts. Seeing the engagement of the young people is great. By time they graduate to the next level, you can see the growth. Many of them don’t know how to measure with a ruler. Watching their love grow for math and science is also rewarding because before they didn’t know what it was, how it works or what can be done with it. It’s important that young people feel important and valued in the community. It’s a challenge to help get volunteers, but we did get block grant money for it.
Resident Support: Partner Organizations
DTE
Resident Support: Funders
No specific funding for this.
Resident Support: Important Outcomes or Lessons
Outcomes:
We’ve kept focus on increasing relationship building and providing affordable housing so people have places to live.
Lessons:
- There’s always a need for more.
- People don’t know how much power they have/ it’s hard for people to know how much power they have when it comes to getting things done. Sometimes just some direction and a tidbit of information create a path to power.
- There’s an impact on morale based on positive development in the neighborhood. When everything seems to be falling apart, people get neighbors to clean up outside of the house instead of dumping garbage out front. It helps people have pride in their neighborhood and keeps their areas and their lots next door clean. On McClellan Avenue, you can see the transformation. It’s not just the grandma cleaning outside because it’s her house, but even the younger generations want to do something to help out the community.
Community Planning and Advocacy: General Description
Community Planning:
- We have community project planning that includes community feedback about and what direction to go in.
- We planning for community clean ups in terms of who has what and what areas the community members are going to clean.
- We’re utilizing a neighborhood revitalization plan for housing and community development.
Advocacy:
- The Community Action Committee is the big, citywide advocacy arm. We work on some of everything from voter registration to the big issues of the day.
- We advocate to keep schools open such as Chandler Elementary which eventually closed. The committee will continue to advocate for other schools to stay open if more schools are set to close.
There’s never enough and there’s always something to advocate for, but also there’s still the opportunity for growth as people understand the power that people have within their hands.
- We advocate on issues of race and gentrification. Most of this comes up with the Community Action Committee. As a whole, the organization is advocating for an anti- racist society. We had a racism training and formed an anti-racism team 10 years ago. They went around to churches and organizations and did trainings. There are 3 or 4 active members still and we want to re-energize our anti-racism team through the Urban Parish Coalition and start facilitating workshops so they can empower people to start talking to churches and other organizations about racism. We try to invite people to the table to have the conversations that aren’t comfortable. There are a couple of resources that were ready made with questions that allow people to have these conversations in the areas where they live, with the groups of people that they hang out/have commonality with and, on a bigger level, at the churches that they attend. Our initial goal was to form a team, go through the training and take our training on anti-racism methods to all our member churches to start dismantling from the inside out. We wanted to look at the structure of the church i.e. who’s in charge and who’s the gatekeeper of the church. It’s an ongoing task.
Community Planning and Advocacy: Partner Organizations
- Constant contact with people from the school system (Steve Wasco)
- Detroit Housing Commission
- Regent 1A of UAW (partnered with them to look at social security benefits and issues on race)
- Black Women’s Lawyers Association in Michigan
Community Planning and Advocacy: Funders
- Lily Foundation funded the anti-racism work when it first started
- Sisters of St. Joseph
- Sisters of Mercy
- Community Planning and Advocacy: Important Outcomes or Lessons
- Outcomes:
- There was relationship building.
- Community members get a lot of education from the advocacy work.
Lessons:
- There’s never enough and there’s always something to advocate for, but also there’s still the opportunity for growth as people understand the power that people have within their hands.
- Sometimes you just have to keep screaming and asking for something until it’s heard all the way up the ladder.
Finally, please rank each role 1 to 5, with 5 being the most frequent role, and 1 being the least frequent role carried out by the organization.
Convening/Facilitating/Collaborations: Frequency Rank
3
Resident Engagement/Empowerment: Frequency Rank
2
Economic Development: Frequency Rank
5
Resident Support: Frequency Rank
5
Community Planning and Advocacy: Frequency Rank
4
Can you please point us to other organizations in Detroit — especially in your immediate neighborhood — that are doing community development work? (Organization name, contact name, email, phone)
Lower Eastside Action Plan (LEAP), Tammara Howard Belvedere Block Club, Capuchins-Province of St. Joseph, Brighter Detroit Community Center (4‑H Center) Matrix Head Start, Nativity Church.
This information is current as of 10/1/2018