Utilizing a Mutual Aid Framework, we will offer community living for up to 4 weeks to Detroit teens experiencing recurrent trauma. The four tiny homes will be stationed at our "Sincerely, Detroit" Youth-led Community House. Youth will help build these homes where other youth can employ as a safe haven to call home as they heal, and find resources and support. Additionally, the house will provide culturally-rooted trauma-informed care, wraparound services, and utilize restorative practices.
According to ACE, one in every four students currently sitting in American classrooms have experienced a traumatic event, and the number is even greater for those living in under-served communities. We are working within city policies that overfund law enforcement and starve social services, like health care and housing. So our radical solution is to create a form of community care where teens can come receive support and resources in order to give them their peace and power back.
Mutual Aid is a political and communal process through which communities that have been ignored and deprived deliberately empower themselves with the resources they have to take care of one another. Because of exclusion from full participation in mainstream systems, groups, often comprised of BIPOC folx, have had to create their own networks as a matter of survival. This is our network of survival as BIPOC youth in Detroit. Youth will build these tiny homes to support their community.
We will be able to create an everlasting safe haven for Detroit youth. We will follow mutual aid's "solidarity, not charity" mission. Embodying reciprocal relationships, one that recognizes people's interdependence democratic decision-making power to those providing and receiving resources, particularly the most marginalized and those are Detroit youth. So the youth who utilize these tiny homes will not just leave after those 4 weeks, they will forever be apart of our family and our communities.
This project has provided additional documentation in a PDF file (projdoc.pdf).
