Latest Update on CoC

Currently, CoC is in transition through our board and staff development. Our board had now selected to expand our geographical area. Therefore we are adding four more areas which include Chadsey, Condon, North Corktown, and Corktown to our geographical area which we will be calling One Southwest Detroit. With the concept of being an idea that we have been broken apart by many initiatives and projects and we are going back on One Vision, one Area, and one Southwest Detroit. With that, we will be expanding our board and recruiting one member all those four areas. Through board development, we have been able to build out committees, stronger and be intentional of the areas we are known for. Which include leadership development, TANN, Tann Action Team, Youth Council, and Alumni ( a new component of development for our leaders).

We are adding this committee for our younger group. They are teaching a wide variety of workshops. Mainly to do with higher education, skill trades, and other career paths. The alumni also do a lot of self-identity, involves, self-care conversation. This is important to address as we realized a lot of people are going through the anxiety of what the society is asking of hem regarding success.

We expanded our geographical areas for the last three years we have been working on those four areas and helping them build associations. We helped them to have entities of leadership from those communities. We are helping all four areas to strengthen their neighborhood association through the building community projects that we have. It is very intentional for us to have the basis of leadership in each community to be able to tap into. As development and education are still not as equitable as we wanted to be.

Some of the other exciting things we are doing is collaborating and meeting with the Ford Motor Company ( they bought the Ford Train Station) to be able to intentional and the pipeline for our young people for entry-level jobs, internship opportunity for the youth, and hopefully to be able to connect our adult into entry-level jobs. As our young people will be coming out of college and we can help them to come back to our neighborhood, in Detroit.

We are currently promoting the first new development that is happening in Vernor Highway and we are currently working with investing Detroit and Southwest Detroit Business Association who is a developer, we are very excited because we have been working with them for ten years and they are building a new development- what they are proposing is equitable, a new development happening in the city of Detroit. This means that though CoC and our efforts of gathering residents and neighborhood voice into development, we have been able to convince them to build certain percentage of affordability and our effort of gathering residents and engaging neighborhood and residents voice into development and have been able to convince them to change affordability rate from 20% to now 30%.

This is the first development of housing on Vernor in 03 years and it is going to set the tone for the rest of the community. It is essential CoC brings lots of awareness about residents engagement and voice. Also, we are going to be connecting the bridge to jobs so we are going to be working with Southwest Detroit Business association to be more intentional as they are licensing and bonding more minority contractors to get some of these contracts of the city as the building is happening.We have the new bridge developing this is also going to bring lots of construction jobs and labor jobs and we will be connecting residents to those jobs.