Gratitude for the Project 2 Women’s Empowerment Workshop!

We’re so grateful to team up with the Project 2 Women’s Empowerment Workshop and appreciate the shout-out on their blog! You can find the blog link here and the post below:

—

Project 2 Partners With Brilliant Detroit

Project 2 has been honored to team up with Brilliant Detroit for the Project 2 Women’s Empowerment Workshop. Cindy Eggleton and Crystal Humphries, of Brilliant Detroit, were kind enough to send deserving participants our way! Project 2 is proud to work with the women of Brilliant Detroit in hopes of making a positive impact that leads to success for Detroit families!

The Brilliant Detroit Story:

Ever since our Founders met in 2015, Brilliant Detroit has rapidly expanded on the wings of our community-based model. We were born out of a vision of repurposing Detroit’s underutilized housing stock as hubs for ensuring kid success in neighborhoods where families with children 0-8 have everything they need to be school-ready, healthy and stable. We have expanded to eight separate locations – Cody Rouge, Southwest, Central, Osborn, Brightmoor, Springwells, Fitzgerald, and Dexter Linwood – in three years, with 13 expected by the end of 2021.

Here’s how we do it: we fix up a promising house in the middle of a high-need neighborhood, which becomes a connection point where families can come together to build community and support. We partner with organizations and caring individuals to implement evidence-based programs in these houses, which address various needs in education, health, family stability and neighborhood interconnectedness.

Everything that we do is about neighbors and families. We do not enter a neighborhood unless we are invited in and we hold listening sessions before beginning our work. We believe that communities led by neighbors are key to an equitable future in Detroit and so we do not provide services “to” people, but instead work “with, for and by” them.

There is a tremendous amount of ownership that our neighbors take in each Brilliant Detroit site, which many refer to as their second home. For instance, Ms. Rachel – a grandmother and regular participant in our Cody Rouge site – took it upon herself to spearhead the creation of a community garden in the connected lot and, not content with simply a garden, led the way to the organization selling produce at the local farmer’s market to raise money for better supplies. She has since taken her involvement one step further by facilitating a weekly workshop on making healthy food on a budget. It is through the dedication of our heroes like Ms. Rachel that this work deepens and we come closer to creating kid success neighborhoods.

On any given day across our sites, you can find children reading and playing with one another and with their parents. You’ll witness kids and adults alike engaged in fitness and healthy eating. You’ll see a unity of spirit in these communities as diverse groups of people come together to make a shared vision possible.

Brilliant Detroit aims to expand to 24 locations by 2024 in order to affect population-level impact in the city of Detroit, where enough neighborhoods transform individually to make a kid success city. We see an equitable Metro Detroit built by neighbors from many different zip codes who are all focused on creating what is best for our children.

There are countless ways to be a part of this vision and we can use everyone’s help moving forward – whether active or passive, financial support or volunteer work – toward a better tomorrow. You can find more information by watching the video below or by visiting our website.

[Click here to watch the video]