A special thank you to Detroit Mayor Michael Duggan and Sandy Baruah, CEO of the Detroit Chamber of Commerce, for facilitating an extremely important meeting of Detroit area leaders around our increasing presence in Mayor Duggan’s city of renewal — Detroit.
Called ‘Detroit Uplift 2020,’ our vision is to announce and then launch and operationalize 20 HOPE Inside locations, 20 HOPE Business In A Box Academies, and 20 HOPE B- Business Compact Schools serving the residents, and supported by the leaders of greater Detroit.
Our founding commitment in Detroit came from a $100,000 grant from the City of Detroit, along with a commitment from Fifth Third Bank, which created our first HOPE Inside in Detroit. The HOPE Inside, Detroit operating within the Northwest Activity Center has been up and operating for a few months now and has already exceeded its expectations around set goals.
Additional commitments announced at the Detroit Uplift 2020 meeting included Deloitte, Michigan becoming a new Member of Operation HOPE and PNC Bank, Detroit becoming a Project 5117 HOPE Partner. The Skillman Foundation, led by the CEO Tonya Allen, also announced their intention to make a substantial investment in our work on the ground in Detroit.
The most exciting announcement of them all was the Henry Ford Health System, led by CEO Nancy Schlichting who was in our meeting, committing to open a new HOPE Inside location within their health system.
This new HOPE Inside, the first HOPE Inside within a hospital environment, will serve the 23,000 plus employees there, as well as the client and family population there.
A special thank you to Mayor Duggan, Sandy Baruah of the Detroit Chamber, Mark Davidoff of Deloitte and Gina Coleman of PNC Bank for their special leadership around this initiative.
More to come. The silver rights movement, is real.
Let’s go..
John Hope Bryant