Michigan Development News, 01/27/09
Lansing State Journal: About 2,200 volunteers hit streets in effort to feed Lansing’s hungry. Here’s a great community service story from the Lansing area:
About 2,200 volunteers hit Lansing’s snow-covered streets as part of The Church of Greater Lansing Project: Love in Action, hand-delivering boxes filled with rice, macaroni, crackers, canned vegetables and other food items to about 2,000 Lansing families.
The project was born out of a meeting last October between several area church leaders and Lansing Mayor Virg Bernero, according to Stephanie Butler, Lansing Partnerships coordinator for Trinity Church, which helped spearhead the meeting.
During the meeting, Bernero explained how getting food to needy families was a significant concern in the city.
“It was decided that if we were going to partner on something, it was going to be food,” said Trinity Church’s lead Pastor Phil Posthuma.
And partner they did.
Over a period of about two months, the coalition – which had become known as The Church of Greater Lansing – raised about $114,000, Butler said.
Coldwater Daily Reporter: Mortgage from ‘94 Habitat home set on fire. Looks like we’re not the only ones who do ceremonial mortgage burnings:
In January 1994, Bob and Barbara Morford thought making house payments for their Rose Street home for 30 years was a long time.
“We went with 15 years so we’d be done sooner, even though the payments were a little more,” Bob said.
On Saturday morning, the Morfords gathered with Branch County Habitat for Humanity members at the material resale facility on East Chicago Road (at the former site of Walters Building Supply) to burn a copy of the mortgage on the group’s first home built in Branch County.
Metro Mode: Dearborn: An Arsenal Of Diversity? Metro Mode has an extended feature in this week’s edition on how the city of Dearborn is becoming a model for multiculturalism:
One wonders if this city with such an illustrious past has the potential of defining what “culturally cool” means for Southeast Michigan. Henry Ford’s $5 a day manufacturing system created a multicultural working community in Dearborn. Entrepreneurial freedom for generations of Middle Eastern people is reinventing the city in a post-racial content. With the excitement surrounding Barack Obama’s inauguration this week, it seems appropriate to imagine this storied city, so intrinsically linked to the region’s past, as a hotbed for a new kind of innovation: diversity.
Deputy Wayne County CEO and Dearborn resident Azzam Elder and Mayor Jack O’Reilly envision the city’s Arab American culture as a destination for visitors as well as permanent residents.
“Promoting of Arab culture would be a huge benefit,” says Elder. “The city has gained national and international recognition for The Henry Ford, why not the National Arab American Cultural Museum and the retail district along Warren Avenue?”
Michigan Development News, 01/19/09
Kalamazoo Gazette Editorial: We’re leading the way in economic development. Times are tough in Michigan and across the country right now, but the folks in K-Zoo must be doing something right.
Michigan’s economy is entering its ninth year of decline. The national economy is in the tank, with the stock market on a long slide and the domestic auto industry looking to Congress and the president for a bailout loan.
Yet in the Kalamazoo statistical area, which has the second-lowest unemployment rate in Michigan behind Ann Arbor, 2008 was a year for mostly good economic news…
In the past year, Kaiser Aluminum has announced it will set up shop in Kalamazoo. Parker Hydraulics announced it has received more aircraft hydraulics system contracts. MPI announced it would triple its work force, although the difficult economy has forced the company to delay its expansion plans. Graphic Packaging International Inc. announced it would expand, adding 160 new jobs next year.
In all, more than 30 companies announced last year that they would create more than 6,000 jobs in this area in the next five to seven years.
Model D TV: Model D TV: Mexicantown. Having made loans in Mexicantown in the past, this is a neat little clip from the folks at Model D. Check it out:
New York Times: Museums Look Inward for Their Own Bailouts. A recent feature in the Arts section of the NYT on how the Detroit Institute of Arts has been able to rejuvenate itself from within (h/t Model D):
Comparable largess is all but nonexistent in Detroit today. Wealthy industrialists have faded from the scene. The Michigan state government gives almost no money to the institute, the city even less. In 1997 Detroit built the Museum of African-American History across the street from the institute, its spanking newness in sharp contrast to its older, crumbling neighbor.
Graham W. J. Beal, who arrived as director that year, has done much to stop the decline, largely — and this is where other museums should pay attention — through the use of material at hand. In 2007, to attract the city’s black majority and woo back white suburbanites, the museum unveiled a top-to-bottom rethinking of all the permanent galleries, with strategic shifts in emphasis…
Whatever its shortcomings, the reinstallation proves that a major museum can recharge itself from within, from its own holdings. And this kind of recharging could well become the only viable route for museums.
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