About

Bring neighbors together 

The work of the narrative strategy broadcast communications team was born from a collective desire of North End community members to have agency when it came to the planning and development of our own neighborhood.

We were preceded by a neighborhood communications committee composed of North End Elders and Leaders.

In its time up until COVID this meeting of community members was responsible for events like the North End Pride Walk, gatherings at Oakland Avenue Farm, a commitment from the Equitable Internet Initiative to help us build a neighborhood intranet and more.

At its conclusion those a part of this committee made the following determination:
– We require the tools necessary to plan our neighborhoods future, archive and celebrate our proud history, and be present to pursue opportunity and to help those in need as those circumstances arise.

We want the ability to shape the narrative strategy and lay the groundwork for broadcast communication.
We would need the ability to freely and safely communicate across the neighborhood digitally, through print, and in person.
– The hard work of the community and its leaders has brought us a small amount of funding to begin creating these communications tools of which you are seeing an early version here and to now!
Here you will have the opportunity to give us feedback and offer us recommendations on what you like and what needs rethinking in addition to finding the information on the site. We will also deliver a flyer with our strategy to each household and host an in-person event every other month that you are welcome you to attend (Check out our next one on our community calendar)

Our goal is to include North End community in building these tools

Digital

A secure, community-operated, accessible digital platform that hosts community applications that the neighborhood can use for its empowerment.

Our goals for the digital pillar to be:

1. Useful
2. Accessible to the people of the North End
3. Functional and Secure

You can see here the start of our work here on this site. We have a slate of applications we are hoping to add over time and we would love suggestions for what you want to see.
For the time being we are interested in hosting the ability for folks to chat with each other, a community calendar, a news page, a wiki, a historical archive.

We have this available here online but a key piece for us is to offer these features in a way that is exclusively available to those in the neighborhood so that their information and exchanges can be private and secure.

The way we hope to do this is we are hosting everything you see here on this site on local community owned servers that are hosted in the neighborhood. These servers will be connected to our neighborhood internet provider EII and what that will do is some pages and URLs on this site will only be accessible if you are directly connected to an EII router or the local servers. You will have a chance to play with our local servers and some of our neighborhood-exclusive features during our bimonthly Grape-Vine.io events. We hope at these events to foster a community willing to maintain our digital communications network and continue building new interesting applications to grow our organizing toolbox and our neighborhood economy.

Print

Our Strategy for developing print media communications is threefold
1. To develop kiosks and captive portals

We hope to work with Vanguard CDC to activate their digital display signboards along the Grand boulevard so that digital versions of our community flyers could be displayed on their existing digital signage. This would be a low cost introduction to test this communication strategy.

The physical structures for the communications committee that we want to build we imagine as kiosks located in four key anchor points along Oakland avenue corridor and eventually at the lowest Bennett Park, Bradbury Park, and the John R strip off Kenilworth 

• The design and construction we hope to commission a talented local Detroit metal worker that we could receive competing bids from artists like Keef Parker, Carlos Nielbock, Tif Masey and other artists we would select from popular community vote. 
• We want these kiosks to be
  • Visually arresting
  • Provide space for the street team and community to leave periodicals, flyers, newsletters, zines, business cards, classifieds, local listings, art, and more
  • Easy to maintain and made with components that aren’t expensive and can be easily replaced  
  • Have a captive portal with a QR code that links to our digital platform so that those in the neighborhood but not on EII can have access.

Beyond these kiosks we would like to embed captive portal devices at notable sites throughout the neighborhood that when people connect to them offer local information about the area and give people the opportunity to share their stories about what makes these locations meaningful to them.

Ideally beyond providing residents the opportunity to exchange information, these kiosks can be built in a way that makes it easy to expand the features offered in the name of community empowerment and mutual aid as inspired by models like the Selden Sharing Table and Detroit Community Fridge Network.

2. We imagine organizing a small team that can cover the nearly 30 streets that compose the North End with about 30-50 occupied houses . This would require printing approximately 1,000 flyers each time we go out. We imagine going out to flyer every month or every quarter depending on how many we can recruit to join these efforts. These flyers would be a single page which would include just headlines of important news with links that take people to our digital platform where they can find more information heading to our digital program. 

Once the street team is established we can work on expanding our responsibilities to include:

• Develop regular distributions that arrive at resident stores with headlines to neighborhood stories linking to the digital platform  
• checking on the kiosks and making sure they are in good condition and have current information. 
• Interviews and archive stories in the neighborhood for residents willing to share stories 
• Troubleshoot the connection to the digital platform throughout the neighborhood .

3. For community alerts like missing persons or individuals in need of immediate support we will connect with the block club leaders across the neighborhood to provide direct pickup of whatever the immediate information that can’t wait until the next flyer distribution. Those leaders will then take responsibility to get that information out to their neighbors.In person talk about the grapevine events including the one on 222 there

In Person

We hope that our microconferences will build the community we need to keep this system running well past when our funding runs through. We see these sites as a space to sit down to disprove the narrative that the north end can’t get along. This can be a place where we heal in spaces in this neighborhood where we have adversity both through dialog and also physically through sound and infrared photobiomodulation that offers light therapy for individuals experiencing vitamin D and infrared deficiency as designed by our team member Onyx Ahsanti.

The goal of these gatherings is multifold 

Get educated on a new community technology and the collaborate with building it ourselves okay so that’s familiar

Check our Community Calendar for the next part and we hope to see you there!