Project Name: Pollution Education 101: Air Pollution Awareness

Award: $5000

Project Description:

The Original United Citizens of Southwest Detroit (OUCSD) has been dedicated to fighting for Environmental Justice, uplifting residents’ voices, and addressing health and air-pollution concerns in southwest Detroit communities by bringing awareness, engagement and education to agencies, academia, officials, and journalists through the lived experience of the areas’ residents. OUCSD operates in 48217, often cited as the most polluted zip code in Michigan. For the grant project, OUCSD President, Theresa Landrum, will host a series of workshops and tours for local residents, especially youth, to teach them about the area’s air quality, so they can learn about what they are being exposed to and how to protect themselves. She aims to connect with younger people to build capacity and foster future advocates.

Project Name: Live Learn Love Health & Wellness Project

Award: $4,500

Project Description:

What About Us, Inc. (WAU) is a resident-led, grass-roots organization founded in 2015 and is dedicated to building neighborhood connectedness and capacity to lift up the voices of residents who feel marginalized. The organization primarily services the Gratiot Woods neighborhood but services are open to all Detroit residents, and offers a range of programming and workshops to Detroit Residents. For this project, WAU founder Tammara Howard is working on installing indoor air filters and air monitors in its resilience hub, as well as a vegetative buffer to improve air quality outdoors. She plans to use the vegetative buffer planting and the air monitor’s readings to teach her neighbors about air quality and get community members involved in air monitoring. 

Project Name: Little Detroit Community Garden

Award: $3,500

Project Description:

From Loretta Powell, owner of Little Detroit Community Garden:

Little Detroit Community Garden nonprofit organization is an educational garden which the community can learn about healthy gardening. We are registered with United States Department of Agriculture and I am a black farmer. We give free fruits and vegetables to our community. We have had cooking demonstration in our community garden and online Cooking Matters Classes. Danny Dolley demonstrates how to build a raised bed out of wooden pallets. He also shows the community how to save money on their water bill by investing in rain barrel or water totes. We both have encourage our neighbors to plant Michigan Native Plants because it helps with our infrastructure. This is our fourth year participating with Arise Detroit Neighborhood Day event. We are located on the Eastside only three minutes away from Stellantis Plant. We constantly have big trucks driving on East Warren. The members of Little Detroit Community Garden are monitoring truck traffic and air quality. We are setting up outdoor cameras to count how many trucks pass by our community garden every day, and we are also installing an air monitor to understand the impact that the truck traffic, nearby the industrial plant, and other sources of pollution have on the air quality in our areas. Our aim is to contribute significantly to policy development targeting truck traffic regulations.

Project Name: Clearing the Air in SW Detroit

Award: $5,000

Project Description:

The Unity in Our Community (UOC) Timebank has been functioning for 15 years in southwest Detroit as a place for community members to come together and share their time and talents with each other. Southwest Detroit is known to experience high levels of air pollution due to several industrial facilities, highways, and diesel truck traffic. For this grant project, the organization is holding workshops in which residents learn to build air filters using box fans and HVAC filters, also known as the Corsi-Rosenthal box. The TimeBank partnered with local organizations working on air quality issues in SW Detroit for these workshops. They aim to use their community workshops as a way to teach residents about air quality and about how they can protect themselves using air filters, and empower participants with the resources they need to continue advocating for clean air in the future.

Project Name: Air Quality Community Outreach

Award: $2000

Project Description:

The Detroit Hamtramck Coalition for Advancing Healthy Environments is made up of residents and concerned allies on the eastside of Detroit working toward healthy environments in Detroit and Hamtramck neighborhoods and communities through advocacy and community education. The coalition is involved in a number of projects working to improve environmental health in their community. For this project, the coalition is holding workshops to teach residents about poor air quality in the area, and providing the materials and instruction to build an affordable air purifier using a box fan and hvac filters. The workshops will be customized to meet the needs of the area’s immigrant population and other communities often overlooked. Their goal is to have 40 air purifiers for residents that have been heavily impacted by poor air quality.

Project Name: Air Quality Fellows Project: Anti-Idling in Schools

Award: $5000

Project Description:

In partnership with BuildOn Detroit, SDEV will expand its existing Anti-Idling in Schools project to four new schools. SDEV will conduct a series of meetings and workshops focused on air quality with students in each school, and work with students at each school to co-create an air quality project. Students will document their learning on social media to bring air quality awareness to their peers, family members and neighbors. This project will also include efforts to explore the potential for additional relationships with instructors, administrators and parents at the participating schools.

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Project Name: The Eastside Air Monitors

Award: $5000

Project Description:

ECN will expand their efforts to collect data on air quality and increase community engagement around climate issues in East Side Detroit by installing air monitors at neighborhood hubs and purchasing wearable air monitors to lend out to residents. ECN will build capacity for air quality advocacy among residents by paying them to collect data through wearable air monitors, making air quality data available to the public, and supporting efforts to centralize data and track air quality.

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Project Name: Democratizing Air Monitoring in Southeast Detroit

Award: $5000

Project Description:

Sanctuary Farms, an urban garden in Southeast Detroit, plans to purchase a mobile air quality monitor and rotate the monitor between community selected sites within Southeast Detroit. This project will enhance air quality monitoring in a cost effective manner, extending its reach into various communities and creating a foundation for community members to use the monitoring system. CAPHE will assist Sanctuary Farms with synthesizing and interpreting data, and providing materials to increase air quality awareness and mitigation among community members and organizations.

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Project Name: Cleaner Air For Quality Outdoor Play

Award: $5000

Project Description:

Big Bad Wolf House, a self-directed learning center serving Southwest Detroit, is located between 2 large trucking centers and two major highways (I-94 and I-96). The center will create an outdoor learning space with layers of filtration, including an air quality garden that will serve as a vegetative buffer, and a fence for additional protection from air pollutants. They will also install air purifiers inside the learning center.

Learn more about this project.

Applicant: Pilgrim Baptist Church

Project Name: Renewable Option for Houses of Worship

Award: $5000

Project Description: The Renewable Option for Houses of Worship Project includes installation of solar powered security lights above the entrances to a building adjacent to a neighborhood Detroit church that the church owns and uses for its community food distribution center for neighborhood residents. This pilot project will be used as an example in a series of three workshops for houses of worship in Detroit that will promote the use of renewable energy by houses of worship in the City.

Project Name: Denby Community Engagement Project

Award: $5000

Project Description: The Denby Community Engagement Project will plant vegetative buffers along Outer Drive and the Whittier business corridor to reduce residents’ exposure to air pollution.

Project Name: In Memory Community Garden Solar Project

Award: $5000

Project Description: The In Memory Community Garden Solar Project will improve air quality and educate residents by increasing the use of renewable energy in Detroit through a pilot solar project in Detroit’s Warrendale neighborhood. This pilot project will install solar lighting in the In Memory Community Garden and will build capacity so that residents, leaders, and youth can learn about the process and benefits of installing solar power, as well as co-benefits related to air quality and safety.

Project Name: Detroit Vegetative Buffer Project

Award: $5000

Project Description: The Great Lakes Environmental Law Center will conduct a survey of local ordinances from across the country to determine the best practices regarding vegetative buffers, use its analysis to create a draft vegetative buffer ordinance for Detroit, and conduct stakeholder outreach to both residents and local government to receive input on the draft ordinance and to educate stakeholders about the purpose and need for the ordinance.

Project Name: Cultural Ambassadors for Clean Air

Award: $2500

Project Description: Cultural Ambassadors for Clean Air [CA4CA]: Be Aware of Your Air Campaign is an educational program with two goals 1) reach populations and social networks from the Latinx, African and Arab American communities to implement culturally appropriate, multi-lingual ways to teach about clean air 2) build a common curriculum together across neighborhoods communicating the same message, cleaner air=better health. The process will enhance the leadership of local community residents on the fencelines in pollution-impacted areas who will lead the process of researching information about pollution, titling them Cultural Ambassadors (CA). CA’s will look at current information, research to develop and implement 3-5 multi-lingual lesson plans that identify the pollution sources, health impacts, and regulatory framework that govern pollution control in Southwest Detroit and South Dearborn.

Project Name: ACT: Advocating For Clean Air Together

Award: $2500

Project Description: The ACT Program, Advocating for Cleanair Together, mobilizes information about the impacts and solutions to air pollution, utilizing power maps, to create a strategic advocacy plan for Detroit, Dearborn and River Rouge. It will be an effort to investigate and identify key decision makers in air quality and public health at the local and state level, and within private corporations. This process will help strategically engage in dialogue and education of those actors, in advocating for solutions such as health impact assessments, cleaner energy, ongoing corporate dialogue, pollution permit intervention, city council resolutions, and/or ordinances and legislation in other geographies to be implemented in SE Michigan.

Project Name: Detroit Asthma Team (DAT)

Project Description: The DAT convened a multi-stakeholder planning group for the development of an air quality management plan for facilities which house early childhood education and child care programs throughout Detroit.

Project Name: Reducing Deadly Emissions in Detroit

Project Description: SDEV will launch an anti-idling public awareness and outreach campaign to encourage diesel engine drivers/owners to reduce idling. SDEV will also work to build public awareness of Detroit’s anti-idling ordinance and to improve the ordinance.