About Our Organization

Inside Southwest Detroit’s vision and capacity has evolved over the years with each new partnership and experience, learning as we strive to meet the needs and requirements of our time and place.

Below are some moments from our organizational development that have guided us around a corner to find ourselves face-to-face with you and our community.

Our Story

Digital Media | 1999

Inside Southwest Detroit was founded as a website in 1999 to share information, contribute to community narratives, engage residents, foster relationships, and promote action related to Southwest Detroit. Resident-created media is an essential commodity for local communities and is an important key to local wisdom.

Inside Southwest Detroit's media projects connect the people and places of Southwest Detroit to each other and to people and places of other communities. Accessing tools for communication and effectively utilizing those provides ownership and authentic narratives about the community.

Through online content and discussion forums Inside Southwest Detroit facilitated discussion about local graffiti culture, lowriding, neighborhoods, youth development, and community. These conversations brought together local residents and students, national and international site visitors, schools, churches, and the non-profit community from a hyperlocal perspective on Carson and Pitt.

Digital Justice | Community Storytelling | iSWD LiveMix | See, Shoot, Share #SWDetroit | The Southwest Detroiter

Expressions | 2002 - 2008

The network interactions facilitated through Inside Southwest Detroit’s website laid the foundation for the organization of a different way to work with youth in community. Expressions began as a lowrider car club meeting in members’ homes to support youth in using the things they were passionate about—lowriding, aerosol art, and media making—as a means toward positive personal and community development.

Expressions used  existing community resources found in mentors who focused their energy on sharing their passions and talents in these arts and activities and meeting community needs while doing so.  Those mentors encouraged youth to do the same so they too could build relationships and own their future.

In 2004 Expressions began attending Detroit Summer’s community potlucks in the Cass Corridor where they began learning and building with youth and organizers from neighborhoods across the city.

Positive Youth Development | Popular Education | Project-Based Learning | Expressions Car Club Cruise Nights

Young Nation | 2008

Young Nation is the organizational evolution of Expressions; a small, community-based youth group from Southwest Detroit developed to create opportunities between the porch and the corner. From 2006-2007 Expressions members participated in a year of leadership and organizational development trainings at the end of which the group voted to launch Young Nation as an organization to support groups like Expressions. Young Nation was incorporated as a not-for-profit organization in 2008 and in 2010 was awarded 501c3 tax free status.

Young Nation promotes holistic youth development in urban settings through mentoring, community education, and passion-driven projects. Our approach is to affect change by inspiring young people through their interests, connection to others and example rather than traditional methods of power, assumption, or coercion. By participating in gatherings, workshops and leadership opportunities, young people find their voice, strengthen their skills and develop plans for their future.

Youth Leadership | Community Cultural Development | Asset-Based Organizing | Blessing of The Lowriders | GrafikJam | Blackbook Sessions

Cultural Organizing | 2011

Inside Southwest Detroit engages the arts and cultural practices, spiritual traditions, and our collective imagination to create new ways of being rooted in collective care and decision making.

In 2011 we joined Detroit Future Youth as one of 12 youth-serving organizations across the city committed to advance best practices in youth leadership and promote social justice through digital media arts. This was our first formal experience and education cultural organizing in community built around shared values.

Here we learned how to be intentional as we situate community culture at the center of organizing for change. Participation in the network was critical in developing our ability to recognize and use resources to collectively imagine and organize for a more equitable future.

Detroit Future Youth | Cultural Organizing | Shared Leadership | Southwest Organizing Network | Casita Cimarron y Yukati

The Alley Project | 2010

TAP (The Alley Project) is an indoor-outdoor art environment—a network of places and programs along the alley developed to support and facilitate creative processes, positive youth-adult partnerships, and community building.

Expressions’ work in The Alley started in 2004 and evolved into a platform to meet community needs with what we already have between us. In 2010 Young Nation embarked on a participatory design process that identified and prioritized community needs into a to-do list and employed existing skills and resources as a tool box… and used them to start to building together while imagining a future very different from how we have been taught to see and address community problems.

Now youth, neighbors, and visitors can create, exhibit, and view street art and other works at The Alley Project. Through art and creative processes, TAP supports healthy relationship and community building. 

Participatory Design | Placemaking | Facilitation of Unlikely Relationships | Open Studios | Studio Luevanos | Via de Los Muertos

8869 Avis | 2015

Our home on Avis and Elsmere in Southwest Detroit is a sculpture of embodied values and practices that has empowered us to live out our vision for community in new ways.

It has strengthened our ability to serve our mission, opening the door of our organization to the community while increasing our capacity to support community partners and help develop a network of shared spaces hyper locally.

We have reactivated a corner in the neighborhood with activity that responds to years of participatory design that identified community needs and the cultural assets to meet them. Even outside hours of operation, the building is designed to use light and visual access to extend the invitation to participate, engage.

Winner of the 2019 AIA/HUD Secretary's Awards →

Porches and Corners | Emergent Strategy | La Sirena Studio | Darkroom Detroit | HHEETT Wall