Following two days of orientation (nothing too fancy and mostly involving sitting in large rooms with large groups of people), the School of Public Health gave us the opportunity to take a "practice plunge", which involved a visit to the Detroit Department of Public Health and then some volunteer work with The Greening of Detroit. The experience was a good one - although I'm a public health student I still don't know what happens on a day-to-day basis at a health department - and the sheer scale and scope of the public health department was shocking. With over 550 employees, the Detroit Public Health Department is responsible for the health and wellness of Detroit's 900,000 citizens - and "health and wellness" spans a large area. The department's interests range from providing immunizations to animal control (rabies prevention), with community outreach and education programs, free clinics, and drug abuse prevention thrown in for good measure. This spectrum of activities requires an equally broad workforce, and the department employs physicians, epidemiologists (we were offered a part-time job until they realized we didn't actually know anything yet...), and social workers. Sadly, the economy has forced the department to make dramatic budget cuts (they used to have 800 employees), which makes it very difficult to provide these necessary services to an underserved population.
The second part of our day, working on a community garden, was eye-opening. Detroit is a dying city. It has approximately one-half of it's peak population, and there are districts which abound with abandoned houses and empty lots. One (very idealistic) urban planning proposal wants to rebuild these vacant lots as community farms, and consolidate Detroit into a collection of "villages", each surrounded by (at least something approaching) farmland, modeled on (no, I'm not making this up) the English countryside. Although this grand project might not be feasible, the progress that they have made has already produced some benefits, in that they've turned an empty lot into a 26-acre park with a playground, soccer fields, and a community garden (I spent the afternoon mulching and trenching this...), and picnic tables. From what I could tell, the families in the area use the park frequently, and they enjoy it. Since it is a community projects, the locals came out to help as well, and this sense of community ownership keeps it pretty well maintained. Interestingly, these gardens connect to public health by providing a source of fruit and vegetables (like most low-income areas, fast-food restaurants outnumber grocery stores) and they have been shown to make the community safer.
The second part of our day, working on a community garden, was eye-opening. Detroit is a dying city. It has approximately one-half of it's peak population, and there are districts which abound with abandoned houses and empty lots. One (very idealistic) urban planning proposal wants to rebuild these vacant lots as community farms, and consolidate Detroit into a collection of "villages", each surrounded by (at least something approaching) farmland, modeled on (no, I'm not making this up) the English countryside. Although this grand project might not be feasible, the progress that they have made has already produced some benefits, in that they've turned an empty lot into a 26-acre park with a playground, soccer fields, and a community garden (I spent the afternoon mulching and trenching this...), and picnic tables. From what I could tell, the families in the area use the park frequently, and they enjoy it. Since it is a community projects, the locals came out to help as well, and this sense of community ownership keeps it pretty well maintained. Interestingly, these gardens connect to public health by providing a source of fruit and vegetables (like most low-income areas, fast-food restaurants outnumber grocery stores) and they have been shown to make the community safer.
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