Detroit challenges young minds to improve city

Something cool is happening in Detroit.

It started last year with a real estate developer desperate to fill a 100-year-old urban industrial building he'd converted to lofts.

Then, corporate and non-profit executives got involved. They committed to creating entrepreneurial jobs within their organizations, perfect for eager and inventive young people.

Next, a group of 27 20-somethings moved to town and began to infiltrate the troubled city with new businesses, non-profits, community groups and most of all, with their ideas. In August came 30 more.

It is Challenge Detroit, an annual fellowship program inspiring entrepreneurism in almost every pocket of business and community in the Motor City. Though it can't make Detroit any less bankrupt, it's creating a sense of hope among the city's leaders and its young people.

Challenge Detroit has that altruistic vibe of Teach For America and the Peace Corps, and that's probably why it attracted 1,600 applicants in its first two years of operation. They're Ivy League graduates, urban planners, artists and MBAs, and they're coming from around the world.

The organizers match the men and women with jobs at General Motors, the Detroit Lions, DTE Energy, the United Way of Southeast Michigan, start-ups and more. One day each week, they come together to brainstorm solutions to the city's toughest challenges. They're tackling transit, public school enrollment, obesity, blight and homelessness.

But the individual stories are most compelling.

Take Ben Hershey, for example. After serving a year at the start-up hiredMYway, the Ohio State University urban planning graduate became so inspired by the start-ups in town that he started a production studio called Zoom Detroit to create animated videos to explain their products and services to the rest of the world. He's one of six fellows to create new Detroit-area businesses (one, a non-profit) after completing the program.

Advertising designer Brandi Keeler is a Detroit native ! charged with re-creating the United Way volunteer experience and introducing an innovative thinking process to its staff. But she's since launched two community projects, Wi-Detroit, an initiative to get Wi-Fi access to all Detroit neighborhoods, and Detroit Bike & Brunch, a cycling and healthy lifestyle advocacy group.

Laurie Asava entered General Motors this year with a business hospitality degree, and is helping to create an internal innovation exchange in a new 10,000-square-foot creative space within the automaker's headquarters. Her boss, Dave Whitman, says she's introducing the corporation to ways to attract young professional employees and get more engaged in the creative community.

Together, the 2013 fellows helped to convert a vacant storefront in Detroit's once-popular retail corridor into a thriving event space.

Founders Doyle Mosher, a real estate developer, and Deirdre Greene Groves tell me it took five years to sell corporations on the idea, to convince them to create these new jobs and to give the young people free rein to create and innovate inside their organizations.

"It was challenging to find creative companies willing to recruit talent in a very different way, to take that risk," says Groves.

But half of the first fellows stayed with their companies, and 90% stayed in town. When the city's bankruptcy was announced just days before Challenge Detroit named its second fellows, the pair braced themselves for dropouts. All 30 fellows said yes to sticking it out.

"Great things come out of adversity, and that's what's happening here," Mosher says.

The program's intent, say Mosher and Groves, is talent recruitment, economic development, philanthropy and public relations. And Mosher has certainly filled up his lofts by now.

But the real result is a kind of entrepreneurism that's almost limitless. And it's letting everyone get involved.

"Detroit is a big city, but it's small enough where you can matter in it," says Keeler. "The wo! rk we're ! doing isn't government, but it has a big impact. The biggest aha I've had, is there's always room to work."

Laura Baverman is a Raleigh, N.C.-based business journalist covering start-ups and entrepreneurship for regional and national publications. She previously covered entrepreneurship for the Cincinnati Enquirer, a Gannett newspaper. Baverman can be reached via e-mail at lbaverman@gmail.comor Twitter @laurabaverman.

Laura Baverman, entrepreneurs columnist.(Photo: none)