Safe Routes to School
This groundbreaking program was tested at Durant-Tuuri Mott Elementart School in the summer of 2018. Over the course of two months, the following occurred: 150 students completed the program and recieved certificates, GIS software was used to find the (statistically-proven) safest routes from home to school and back again for 77 students, 44 families created Emergency Route plans, and 112 students recieved hands-on bike safety classes.
What explains the success of Safe Routes to School? I believe it was a combination of Flint Urban Safety Corps’s easy rapport with children and DTM’s strong families.
Americorps Alums 4 Central Park
Many Americorps alumni live in Flint’s Central Park/Fairfield Village neighborhood, a leafy collection of humble abodes bordered on the left by Interstate 475. It’s a peaceful place to live but it has a big problem: trash. It seemed to only get worse over time and the pandemic threatened to push things over the edge. So one evening in March 2020 some fellow alums and I decided to form an all-volunteer coalition to solve the issue. We decided on weekly cleanups surrounding a particular intersection or a few streets. Working piecemeal like this, we completely change the
look of the neighborhood by September. Flushed with this success we decided to focus on other areas of concern: rusty appliances in people’s yards, overgrown clusters of shrubs/trees, and broken wooden fences.
These new projects were more labor intensive, but that never stopped us. By June 2021 “Phase 2” was completed and Central Park/Fairfield Village looked even better. I’d like to thank everyone who helped volunteer, even if it was for just a day. Every bit counts.
