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| When they weren't sweating, UMC youth were bonding in Detroit this summer. |
Detroit is a destination.
Maybe not the kind people pack extra sun-tan lotion for or the type people fly in from the other side of the country to visit, but it’s a becoming a destination nonetheless — the kind where United Methodists help a city in need of revival by organizing their own weeklong revivals of sorts.
The Motown Mission Experience, a project of the Young Leaders Initiative, has been rebuilding homes and sprucing up abandoned lots for six years, but the summer of 2010 breathed new life into a mission that has a future that is full of potential.
Between 225 and 250 workers graced the streets of the Motor City for six separate weeklong missions, nearly five times the number of participants from 2009. Carl Thomas Gladstone, the director of the Young Leaders Initiative, said transformation was alive and well in Detroit this summer, both in changing perception’s of the often-condemned city and in the faithful gathering of UMC servants.
“Our major partner in the home repair projects is the Joy Southfield Community Development Corporation…over the course of the six weeks they have cleared out like 88 empty lots that had been overgrown to the point of jungles,” he said. “With six weeks in a row of projects we were kind of able to see more kind of successful endpoints for a lot of the projects compared to previous years where it was one or two weeks at a time. That was really cool.”
The increased workload was made possible by the help of three summer interns, as well as a grant-funded position that took care of updating www.motownmission.org, multimedia projects and PR outreach.
More workers meant more people getting a close-up look at Detroit, and Gladstone said educating people about the devastation and the hope they can provide is job number one.
“One of the things we try to say at the beginning of the week is that many of our churches are sending mission teams down to Haiti, down to the Gulf Coast after Katrina…and we’re letting them know that the same kind of devastation that happened in Katrina is happening here in Detroit,” he said. “In a recent BBC documentary one of the guys said, ‘Detroit is like a slow-motion Katrina.’ So I think one of the things people are realizing about this city is it’s not just ‘people down there who can’t make a go of it,’ — this is a place that is facing the kind of disaster that if you look at it the right way, we should be called to disaster recovery work.”
Local metro churches are a big help with the project, providing casserole dishes and other foods to help make dinner for 30-40 people — something Gladstone encourages local church members to share with work crews so they can hear their stories.
The mission team is also working on building up a database of people who can show up at sites and show groups of high school students how to do things like “drywall or build stairs.”
They are looking into the possibility of adding additional staff leadership in the future through a University of Michigan program called “Semester in Detroit.”
“Students come and live downtown and they take classes at Wayne State University and they also have two days a week, 9-5, working with a local non-profit on some sort of project,” Gladstone said. “It’s an ongoing program entering its third year, so a number of non-profits have benefited from this.”
The Motown Mission Experience would also like to be more than just a summertime destination.
Gladstone said there have been ongoing discussions about making the project an “alternative break option” for college students in either February or March.
No matter what time of year it is though, it’s not all work without play at the Experience.
“Everyday we encourage groups to work from about 9 (a.m.) to 3 (p.m.) and then from about 3:30 to dinner time we encourage them to go out and explore Detroit, so some days they might go to Belle Isle to play Ultimate Frisbee or other days they might go to the waterfront or visiting the Motown music museum or different places around Detroit,” he said.
Groups also go to Detroit Tigers’ games nearly every week and Gladstone brings in musicians each week, varying from cover bands to “a rap artist with spiritual lyrics,” to worship music.
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