The East Michigan Environmental Action Council (EMEAC) has named long-time community activist and author, Dr. Ife Kilimanjaro, co-director as part of a new, shared leadership model for the Detroit-based nonprofit. In celebration of women in leadership and shared leadership, EMEAC invites members of the community to a wine and cheese reception May 10 from 7 p.m.-9 p.m. ...

The questions being raised in Detroit are important for the whole country. Over the last few years, we have seen an assault on our shared values, conventions and civic assumptions unlike anything previously experienced in this country. Except for brief, extreme periods of Martial Law, declared in emergency situations, no citizens of a city have had their basic rights and responsibilities so perversely viola ...

The American family must be redefined, reinvented and re-created because today’s nuclear families are caricatures of what families have been and can be. The family is still the best place to prepare the next generation for life. But to fulfill this role, families need to become multi-generational communities of work. This transformation cannot take place separate and apart from the transformation of our com ...

I love this season: waking up the garden, prepping beds, planting transplants and planning opening day for farmers market. Farmers markets are an important part of the landscape in the Detroit community because this is the place where you can find the freshest produce, breads, cheese, eggs and more. It’s also the place where food assistance shoppers may optimize their shopping dollars. When making a purchas ...

It is past time for the Detroit City Council to rethink its role under occupation. Their most recent vote to approve the no-bid contract for the Jones Day law firm is one more indication that the Council has no moral compass. Even Detroit’s most consistent voice of the business community, Crain’s, acknowledged the conflict of interest inherent in the city hiring the former law firm of the current Emergency ...

American families today are so unlike those in which human beings have traditionally raised children that it is questionable whether they should be called families at all. Since the invention of agriculture more than 10,000 years ago, children and young people have been raised in families which included not only parents and siblings but other relatives of all ages. Within this multi-generational family grow ...

On April 4-6, the Detroit Food Policy Council hosted its third annual food summit at Focus: HOPE. The theme of Detroit Food 2013 was “What’s on Your Plate?” More than 200 people participated in the event, including at least two dozen youth. There were panel discussions, interactive workshops, video clips, a youth educational track and of course, good food. Also evident was youth leadership. ...

I was watching TV the other day. Commercial break. Cut to a lush green lawn. A single yellow dandelion springs up through the emerald expanse. The heroic protagonist appears left. He spies the flower, runs, dives, somersaults onto the lawn and pops up sturdily on one knee. Brandishing a bottle of weed killer, he fires. The patented nozzle rains hell on the defenseless sunbather. The flower withers. And dies ...

These are unprecedented times in Detroit. One man has the absolute power to make every decision about the public life of our city. The Emergency Manager has complete authority over every single aspect of civic responsibility. ...

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday, in the middle of January, has been a national holiday since the mid-1990s. Although Dr. King was born in January, April will always be MLK’s month for me because it is not only “the cruelest month,” as T.S. Eliot put it in his 1922 poem “The Wasteland,” it is also one of the most challenging. April is the month of the Crucifixion. But it is also the month of the Resur ...