SID ‘18 Fallin’… In Love with the D

Craig Regester, SID Associate Director

As Semester in Detroit begins our 10th-anniversary year, we are thrilled to welcome our 19th cohort to the wonderful, challenging and dynamic world of Detroit. This fall, our students come from as far away as Silver Springs, Maryland to as close as Southwest Detroit. We have students from the Stamps School of Art and Design, the School of Education, the College of Literature, Science and Arts, and Grand Valley State University. Their majors are wide-ranging and include: economics, history, human resources management, creative writing, LGBTQ studies, German, and more. Together, they make for an engaging and vibrant living/learning community.

In addition to their enrollment in SID’s immersive urban studies curriculum, students are interning this fall with both long-standing and first-time community partners. Continuing their invaluable partnerships with SID are: 482Forward, D-Town Farm/the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, Eastern Market Corporation, InsideOut Literary Arts Project, Southwest Detroit Business Association, and Sugar Law Center. We are grateful to our newest community partners, Charlotte Mason Community School and the Detroit Justice Center, for agreeing to host our students for the first time. The hard-working staff at our community partner sites - who spend precious time supervising and mentoring our students - are really the unsung and invaluable teaching faculty in this program.

The first few weeks of every SID semester is a whirlwind for everyone. In addition to getting to know their peers, faculty, and community partners, SID takes great care to introduce our students to friends of the program who, we believe, represent a just, equitable and “people’s vision” of the City. In the first few days of their orientation, our students met and talked with long-time Detroit activists and community leaders, including: Darryl Jordan of EMEAC/Cass Corridor Commons, Janet Jones (and Allison and Adrienne!) from Source Booksellers, Jamon Jordan of Black Scroll Network History and Tours, and Olayami Dabls of the Dabls Mbad African Bead Museum. As the semester unfolds, we will continue to introduce our students to many teachers among the solidarity network of people and organizations who have fought for decades to make Detroit a morally rich, accepting and nourishing community for so many.