​Last Tuesday, as a part of our weekly enrichment activity, we went to Brilliant Detroit’s headquarters to help organize their community center. Before volunteering, I had never heard of Brilliant Detroit. Founded in 2015, Brilliant Detroit’s mission is to build kid success families and neighborhoods where families with children 0-8 have what they need to be school ready, healthy and stable. They are currently in 12 different locations across Detroit, and have helped support thousands of families during the pandemic by providing food boxes, learn-at-home kits, laptops, baby supplies, winter clothing, children’s books and much more. Families impacted by the organization have also seen improvements in 75% of Brilliant Detroit’s measures of kid success including education, health, and family support. Even during my brief time volunteering with them, I could tell that everyone at Brilliant Detroit is passionate about supporting the education of children in communities across Detroit.

Brilliant Detroit was created because people saw the need for better early childhood education. Today 60 percent of Detroit children under five live in poverty with the majority of kids not ready for kindergarten. By third grade only 14 percent read at grade level. Added to this is the fact that 30,000 of the city’s kids have zero learning and care options in their nearby vicinity. Thus, Brilliant Detroit was created to coordinate and connect what works for families and kids in one centrally located, welcoming place. 

Brilliant Detroit’s delivery model is also rather unique because it uses underutilized housing stock to create early child and family centers inside the neighborhoods it serves. When a community invites Brilliant Detroit to set up a community center in their neighborhood, Brilliant Detroit often partners with the local community organization to help establish their base and provide relevant services to the community. Families work alongside staff to ensure programs and services meet the needs of neighbors and support the intellectual, social and emotional growth of their young children. In each of their locations, neighbors come together for fellowship, activities and learning to assure school readiness, and provide needed support for families. By rallying neighborhoods and families to help promote better early childhood education, Brilliant Detroit has been able to foster kid success neighborhoods and contribute to creating a better Detroit.

While Jenny and I are working at Green Garage, Steve Tobocman working at Global Detroit stopped by and greeted Joanna. Joanna then introduced Steve to us and told us about what Global Detroit does.  For our storytelling project with Eutan, who prefers to have a French interpreter present during our interview, the interpreter comes from Global Detroit.  

Global Detroit was founded in 2010. They are working for immigrant inclusion, specifically “develop and implement inclusive strategies to drive the growth, revitalization and broadly shared prosperity of Detroit and Southeast Michigan”. They divided their work into five subcategories: research & policy, talent, entrepreneurship, neighborhoods, and inclusive institutions. Under the category of research & policy, Global Detroit conducts research on the impacts that immigrants brought upon and recommends strategies for different areas. Regarding talents, Global Detroit proposed the Global Talent Retention Initiative, helping companies connect with global talents.  In addition, their Global Talent Accelerator program prepares those talents, primarily students given that Michigan has the ninth largest international students in the United States, for those jobs.  As in Entrepreneurship, Global Detroit helps international founders create jobs in SE through their Global EIR (Global Entrepreneur In Residence) program, and connect them with the extensive support and resources that the city has to offer, which is part of their Growing Small Business program.  In terms of neighborhood, Global Detroit’s Opportunity Neighborhoods program helps connect business owners to “homeownership and home repair programs, foreclosure prevention, small business support, community engagement opportunities and other resources.”  As mentioned previously, Global Detroit developed strategies that could be served as models in other regions. That also extends to the private sides, such as business and nonprofits. Some examples include “ developing outreach and recruiting strategies, navigating the visa process, creating an immigrant-friendly workplace culture”

As an immigrant myself, I thought that my family would benefit greatly from Global Detroit. My parents have been in the States for almost ten years and neither of them is able to speak English fluently, which means that they could not work for 99% of the jobs in this country. They told me that they do not feel comfortable leaving their comfort zone, this social circle with only people working in Chinese restaurants in Nevada, which further discouraged them from learning English and participating in any job that does not have existing Chinese employees.  They are hard working people, but they just never had any resources for career readiness, and I believe many other families in Michigan suffer from the same problem.

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Starting this summer, I felt confident about my nonprofit industry knowledge. I have founded and led numerous nonprofits over the past few years and thought I did not have much more to learn. Looking back now, I see how wrong I was. My journey with TechTown this summer has taught me lessons I could not have imagined. This stems because of the environment of Detroit, size of TechTown, and people at TechTown.

I have learned much from my experience with TechTown and the dozens of staff interviews I have had with TechTown staff. Three stand out to me. First, I learned that instability is the norm in nonprofits. Covid-19’s move to virtual work, funding confusion, and new hires can change quickly, which affects organizational structure and priorities. On that note, I found the importance of the resilience needed to work with limited resources. While making recommendations, we have had to adapt many of them so they can be feasible executed with TechTown’s budget and staffing constraints. Secondly, I discovered how scalable nonprofits are. I always pictured nonprofits as organizations with small teams, limited funds, and small service or product offerings. TechTown rejected this stereotype. Its services are diverse and extensive, and their team has many, impressive moving parts. It has encouraged me to pursue nonprofits now that I understand that they can be large and scalable. Thirdly, I learned how important community engagement is since nonprofits serve community members. For instance, Ellen and I were tasked with interviewing entrepreneurs and TechTown Alumni, which has been incredibly useful. By reaching out to community members, TechTown entrepreneurs feel heard and appreciate us understanding their problems. Additionally, the connection with the community has been super helpful in identifying and fleshing out recommendations to improve TechTown programs. These lessons will be invaluable in how I run future nonprofits and startups.

All in all, my experience with TechTown has surprised me. Entering the experience, I felt like and expert, but I learned new things about the creativity and user input important to nonprofits in a chaotic nonprofit world. I look forward to finishing this summer at TechTown, and, more importantly, taking these lessons with me going forward.

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​To be honest, I was pretty intimidated by my project during the first week of the DukeEngage program. My expectations going into TechTown’s office on the first day was that I would be working on evaluating TT’s major entrepreneurship programs and providing some recommendations for improvement. That was what was written on my one-paged project description that I received earlier this summer. However, when I met with my supervisor, Angeline, again on the first day, she handed Mick and I a ten-page document outlining all of our tasks for the summer. Besides evaluating TT’s entrepreneurship programs, I was also expected to organize a database of alumni contacts, improve TT’s alumni engagement strategy, help define success for TT, create a client journey map, and write a checklist of requirements for TT’s programs.

I clearly remember feeling overwhelmed with all my new tasks. It also seemed to me like TechTown wanted me to shift away from evaluating their flagship entrepreneurship programs and focus more on improving alumni engagement. So very early on I had to pivot the focus of my project and juggle multiple different tasks at the same time. This seems to be a common occurrence with nonprofit consulting projects because I know I wasn’t the only one in the DukeEngage cohort having this struggle. After talking to other project teams, I found that their projects had also changed somewhat in scale or focus. I think this is to be expected in the nonprofit world because the work and projects community organizations undertake must change to match the changes in the needs and priorities of their community.

I was also pleasantly surprised with how informal TechTown’s work culture is. On the first day when I went into the office, I also had the chance to sit in on TT’s monthly staff meeting. The meeting’s atmosphere was very relaxed, people talked freely and joked with each other, and I could really see TT’s strong sense of community. Unlike private sector jobs that follow a more rigid and formal work culture, I learned that working in the nonprofit world is really about teamwork and strong interpersonal relationships. Even after just a few weeks of working with TechTown, I feel like I am truly a part of the TechTown family, and for that, I feel extremely blessed.