Poverty and Prosperity by the Numbers with Kim Trent

In this episode, Donna and Sam welcome the Deputy Director for Prosperity for the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity (LEO) to discuss her work guiding and building support for efforts to boost the economic security of Michigan citizens. 

As Deputy Director for Prosperity for the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity, (LEO), Kim Trent is charged with guiding and building support for efforts to boost the economic security of Michigan citizens through policy, strategic initiatives, programs and partnerships. Her leadership duties at LEO include serving as the key staffer to the Michigan Poverty Task Force. She leads the department’s prosperity division, which includes the Michigan High-Speed Internet Office, Office of Global Michigan, Michigan Women’s Commission,  Michigan Community Service Commission, MI-STEM Council, and Black Leadership Advisory Council. She also serves as LEO’s Equity and Inclusion Officer.  

A native Detroiter with Michigan roots that stretch back to the 1830s, Trent holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Wayne State University. She also completed graduate studies at the University of Cape Town in Cape Town, South Africa. She has completed fellowships with the American Political Science Association in Washington D.C. and the Michigan Political Leadership Program at Michigan State University and is a graduate of the Detroit Regional Chamber's Leadership Detroit program.

To stay up to date on all things Authentically Detroit, click here. 

DETROIT BY THE NUMBERS WITH ALEX B. HILL:

• 2,000

• Tree plantings planned by City of Detroit this spring (GSD)

• 25

• ICE arrests in the last week of March that local groups have responded to, if that is a weekly standard that is close to 100 Detroiters a month (Peoples Assembly Detroit)

• $3 billion

• Balanced budget proposal presented by Mayor Sheffield

• 65%

• Detroit landlords have a Detroit address (not sure if that is just the LLC though?) 93% own 1 or 2 properties, 62% are not associated with bad actor or speculator behavior

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Up next, Authentically Detroit welcomes Deputy Director for Prosperity for the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity, Kim Trent, to discuss her work guiding and building support for efforts to boost the economic security of Michigan citizens. But first, our segment with Alex B. Hill of Detroit Totography, Detroit by the Numbers. Keep it locked. Authentically Detroit starts after these messages.

Donna Givens Davidson 0:21

Calling on residents and lovers of the East Side, the Spring Staldenmeyer Showcase on April 16th is your invitation to come in, get connected, and discover all that the Stalemeyer Wellness Hub offers for Eastsiders. Experience the space, meet staff and instructors, and learn more about programs designed to support everyday life. Whether you're looking for health and wellness resources, opportunities for your children and family, or ways to stay connected and engaged in the community, join us on April 16th and see why the Staldenmeyer is the place to be.

SPEAKER_00 1:27

Thank you so much for listening in and supporting our efforts to build a platform of authentic voices for real people here in the city of Detroit. We want you to like, rate, and subscribe to our podcast on all platforms. Today, we're joined by Donna's good friend and also the woman leading Michigan's poverty task force, Kim Trent. We also have Alex B. Hill of Detroit on the line for our monthly segment, Detroit by the Numbers. Kim, thank you for joining us. Welcome to Authentically Detroit. How are you today?

SPEAKER_04 1:53

I'm good. Thank you, Sam. And you know what? You said that in the exact right order that I am Donna's good friend first. Because being her good friend has really helped inform my work with the Poverty Task Force. Because, I mean, you know this from being around her, how brilliant she is, how innovative she is, how she always knows the latest stuff. Um, so it has been such a blessing to have her as a friend in this work.

Donna Givens Davidson 2:16

And you know, being the introverted nerd that I am, it is such a blessing to have Kim as my friend. Kim, you are just an amazing person in your own right. And so we're so happy. I remember when the post for the poverty task force was put up, and remember some of the controversy about who's going to get that work. And we need somebody like you to really shepherd us through and bring people together. Um, getting people from so many different departments to really think through how can we address um poverty holistically and not through slogans. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_04 2:47

Well, I mean, I think that um when it it it is such a huge, huge responsibility. I mean, and it's a little intimidating when you're told that you know you want the you know, the governor wants you to lead the work of combining 14 State Departments um directors, bringing them to the table, having them work collaboratively. You know, the in the Bible it says the poor will always be with you. And there are so many people who are satisfied with that. Like, oh, that's just gonna be a part of our existence. But to change the conversation so that people understand we don't have to have poverty in our country. It's a choice, it's a political choice, it's a policy choice. Yeah, and we are doubling down on poverty in our country right now on the federal level. And unfortunately, it's those decisions are being pushed to the state and local level as well. So those of us who are in the fight to continue to say we don't have to have poverty. Yeah, poverty is not inevitable, it's a choice. And so um, you know, I, you know, obviously we still have poverty. I I wish I could say six years later, no poverty in Michigan. Certainly, um we still have too many Michiganders who are struggling, but it's revolutionary to even say the word poverty as a policy priority.

Donna Givens Davidson 4:05

I cannot wait to get in that with you because I remember when you couldn't even say the word poverty because it was a bad word. Oh, yeah. You couldn't everything was middle class or low income or low income. Yes. Oh, right, right, right. That's true. We we had low-income people and middle class. That's all we had. So I can't wait for that conversation. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:22

One of that uh, you know, part of that fight is uh empowering people with good information. One person that does that really well is Alex B. Hill. We have him on the line uh of Detroit for our monthly segment, Detroit by the numbers, where we highlight significant data and numbers from the past month for Detroiters. Here, Alex Hill of Detroitography and the chairsperson of the City of Detroit's Go Data Commission. The Go Data Commissioners are a diverse group of stakeholders, including data experts, community leaders, and representatives from various sectors. This commission is dedicated to ensuring that the city's open data initiatives serve the needs of all residents and promote informed decision making. Sometimes there are numbers and data points in the news, but it's hard to know the context behind them. So, Alex, talk to us about what numbers you have for us this month.

SPEAKER_08 5:13

Let's do it. Um so the first number I've got, uh, and these are numbers from March is uh 2,000. Um and that's the the number of tree plantings that are planned by the city of Detroit for this spring. Um and although that sounds like a big number, uh Detroit has had a pretty significant tree canopy loss, um, you know, largely from uh the Dutch Elm disease, uh and then just other you know other causes that uh um have have created a loss of our street trees. Yeah. Uh at one point, you know, we had 400,000 Dutch elm trees. Um so we have a long way to go to get back from that. Mary talks more about this this go ahead, Alex. Yeah. Oh, I was gonna say, we you know, at that time we were known as the city of trees for good reason because we had hundreds of thousands of street trees.

SPEAKER_00 6:11

Yeah. Uh Mary Sheffield uh just last month did a uh announcement um in a city neighborhood street uh about street lights. One thing that I hope to be a part of my street to get more mid-street lights. We need more mid-street trees because I can go back on the Google Maps and see, you know, the years that these trees have been removed. Some of some people in their front, um, you know, across from their sidewalk, they'll have the little baby trees planted. And you can tell, like why. Does anybody know why a lot of the trees in the mid-2010s got got yeah?

Donna Givens Davidson 6:46

I mean, there are a couple things. First of all, trees get diseased. And so when you have a disease tree, you have to kill it. I mean, you have to take it down and replace it. And so you have a lack of tree replacement. You have to be really honest, though. There's a lot of Detroiters who are used to dead trees um being a nuisance, dead trees on the roof or in their backyard, and they can't get the dead trees removed. And so when you start talking about planting new trees, you get resistance. When you plant a new tree, you have to take care of it. And my question about these trees is do you remember Hans Woodlands? I remember I was so excited. There are all these trees being planted. And so I was on my bike and um on a bike ride with Plymouth Church, and we stopped by Hans Woodlands, and I'm looking up, and it just looked like little sprigs sticking up from the ground. I was like, Are you kidding me? They will one day be trees. And now they are, you know, 12 years later, they are trees. But the question I have is are we going to plant tree trees or sprigs? Because we know one costs a lot less than the other. Um, and the canopy we need um has to be accelerated. Trees aren't just, you know, pretty. And I I think trees are beautiful. My mother loved trees, and so being Shirley's girl, I always appreciated the beauty of trees. And trees provide canopy, and we'll be talking about the mother tree design for our um for the Angela Brown Wilson Gardens. So that's what trees mean to me. But trees also protect from environmental harm, they absorb um toxins in the air, and they provide cover to shelter people from the hot sun, so that you know, in some communities, like in neighborhoods without trees, you have really high levels of heat islands. If you want to figure out what wealth looks like in Detroit, look at an aerial map and look where the tree cover is, and those are going to be the wealthiest, most stable areas of the city.

SPEAKER_00 8:32

Yeah, I got a tree right in front of my house, but my neighbors all down the street have the little baby trees that have been planted in the last five or ten years. And you can see, as I said, as I mentioned, now you can see there's all these neighborhoods used to have trees. Uh, you just saw this morning on Twitter. Did you Alex see that side-by-side photo of Belle Isle from 1950 to now and just the lack of density? Oh, yeah. Yeah, you saw that. Yeah. I mean, I I it is amazing. And yes, you Donna, you're making a point in which there is some somehow resistance because people feel like, oh, I'm tree's gonna grow and then it's gonna grow into my house.

Donna Givens Davidson 9:10

Well, I mean, there's reality.

SPEAKER_00 9:11

Yeah.

Donna Givens Davidson 9:12

Um, we talked to a lot of residents whose chief complaint is I can't get my debt tree removed. You know, speaking of Mayor Sheffield, she announced that she was gonna fix all the broken sidewalks all through the city of Detroit. And you know, not too long ago, we had a mayor who said, Oh, we can't afford to fix broken sidewalks. Um, we'll talk more about that um state of the city. I know that's not planned here, but you know, it's important to me that we talk about removing all the dead trees because dead trees don't provide the benefits of live trees. And we can't get community support. The other thing is making sure that we're planting the right kind of trees for this environment, and the other thing is making sure that the tree health is good enough that they don't just die on you. Because um, our late crate Angela Brown Wilson talked to me about trees that were planted on her block to replace some of the trees that died, and the trees that were planted there died as well. Um, so let's make sure that we're getting healthy trees and it's the right tree selection for this climate and on these blocks.

SPEAKER_00 10:07

Yeah. Alex, you have a another notable number. Um, a lot of people across the city have been uh sending me Twitter or Instagram messages, text messages that they have my number. Hey Sam, you know that there's a there's another ICE arrest happening. Uh you have the the number uh that that uh this advocacy group uh uh says happened in the last week of March.

SPEAKER_08 10:31

Yeah, and and and this is just for the last week of March. Um they kept track of 25 ice arrests. Um and you know, there's no there's no good numbers. Um obviously the federal government is not reporting their numbers. Um but if we if we take that as a a standard for a week, you know, that's a hundred Detroiters um who were arrested by ICE in the last month, potentially. Um and maybe that's a underestimate, maybe it's an overestimate. Um, but I think this is um you know an area where uh I think I also just saw a story of another Detroit high school student was arrested by ICE. Um so you know, really hoping that we see some some kind of city response um to keep our our residents safe.

SPEAKER_00 11:20

And it is interesting when you talk about the number of people deported. Uh obviously when we talk about uh you know this topic, a lot of people will say, well, Obama deported more people than any other president ever. But we've also taken the reported numbers for a grain of salt, I think, even more now. Um there's an open question uh about the politics that go into this reporting of how many uh people are being arrested by Department of Homeland Security units. Uh not really any sense from the Trump administration if we're gonna ever get an accurate number on that.

Donna Givens Davidson 11:59

Well, you know, if Obama was doing all this deportation, he was doing more than Trump, why are they building all these warehouses all over the United States if nothing has changed? You never heard about people going into high schools and daycare centers and courts and churches and trying to arrest people. There's no holds barred. And, you know, the scary part of it is that the people most likely to be arrested still are people who are stopped for traffic offenses, and those are most often to be black immigrants and any other group of people, but we think it's a Hispanic thing. Um the challenge is that we have these narratives and these images of the people who are being deported, but we're not disaggregating these numbers by where they're being taken from and what the people look like. I think if people understood that they also stood had faced a risk factor, maybe we would have more people up in arms. But because we think of it as a Southwest Detroit thing, and it's not all happening in Southwest Detroit, we get to um not care. I mean, and it wouldn't matter to me if they were all Mexican. It wouldn't matter to me if they were all Venezuelan because human rights, human beings have rights. And I'm so glad we're gonna talk to our friend Kim about this. So it it pains me, but what also pains me is hearing my sisters, my friends say things like, well, it's their fault, they should not have voted for Trump, as though undocumented immigrants were at the polls voting. The other thing is the escalation of things like arresting people while they're waiting for green cards, arresting people and deporting people while they have work permits in the United States, simply because they are not citizens. Um, you cannot compare this to what Obama did, although you hear people trying to, you know, minimize it. And so my only question is this if if Obama was doing all this, why do we have all these new ICE officers? And why are we building these facilities? And who's going into these facilities? But that's a scary conversation.

SPEAKER_00 13:55

It is. Alex, uh, you have another number. It's a scary big number.

Donna Givens Davidson 14:00

That's a great big number.

SPEAKER_00 14:01

Yeah. Tell us more.

SPEAKER_08 14:02

Yeah, it's three billion. And that's the uh the balanced budget proposal that was presented by Mayor Mary Sheffield um uh March 9th. Um that's that's on par though with with uh the way city budgets have um have been presented in the past, although I um whenever I mention number people are always surprised. And so I think it's helpful for folks to know the the kind of level that the Detroit city budget is at to provide for all the departments and services um that go into running city governments.

Donna Givens Davidson 14:36

That's three billion dollars, paying every single full-time city worker a living wage, increasing pay of bus drivers to equivalent to the suburbs, fixing all the sidewalks, putting streets in mid-block. What it shows if she could do this and create a balanced budget with this, and I know there's gonna be some you know negotiation with city council, there always is, but if she could do this with that balanced budget, why couldn't the her predecessor do some of the same things? So I was at the State of the City um last week, and it was um oh my goodness, it was great because um partly just because the black national anthem was so beautiful. I was like, who is that woman singing that? I mean, she girlfriend could sing, but listening to very practical, detailed description of things that are going to be done is something that I'm not used to hearing. Um it felt very close to home. And so not only is it balanced, but it felt good. And I actually think most of the city council members um that I talked to that night also were feeling very good about that. So it was, it was, it's a good number and it's balanced.

SPEAKER_08 15:45

Right. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And yeah, as you said, there are there are so many um wonderful carve-outs for these people people programs that are are really gonna uh I think have big impacts for city residents.

Donna Givens Davidson 16:01

Yeah. Okay, I can't wait to talk to this about this next number.

SPEAKER_08 16:08

Yeah, so last number I've got uh for March is 65%. Uh and that's the number of Detroit landlords that have a Detroit address. Um you know that uh I don't know the caveats there if that just means their their LLC is has a Detroit address or them, but um there's this great new report from Detroit Future City and data-driven Detroit digging into what the rental landscape looks like in Detroit. Um some other notable numbers in that report were that 93% of Detroit landlords own um just one or two properties. Uh and then um I I run this project on land speculators and tracking them year over year. Um, they found 62% of Detroit landlords were not associated with um some of that common bad actor or speculator behavior. Right.

Donna Givens Davidson 16:59

So I I want to talk about that a little bit because I think these numbers obscure something that we're not as familiar with, and that is some of these landlords like Mike Kelly, who don't own rental property because they're so-called leasing to own it or selling it by way of predatory land contracts to consumers to evade rental regulations. Um, at one point, Michael Kelly, 99.9% of his properties were leased-to-owned properties or um land contract properties. And so I think these numbers obscure the vulnerability and the risk factors facing folks. I've heard a lot of people who own properties and rent out properties saying, look, it's not that bad. But on this side of the street where I sit, looking at where people are living in some properties, I know it is. And I know there's a big effort right now on part of many people who are investing in um changes to our city processes to help get people out of these predatory land contracts, which are flooding the state, and also to regulate them, to tighten them up so that they are as regulated as for sale and rental properties, leased-owned properties are not regulated by contract law, they're not regulated by um landlord tenant law. And so I think the next thing I want to work with you on, Alex, is looking at the rest of that. Do you have any numbers on that? What percentage of um let people who are purchasing these slum properties, what percentage of those properties are being rented out? Because I was not able to get a good number. What percentage are being rented out and which ones are so-called being sold?

SPEAKER_08 18:32

No, that is a good question. I don't know that they had that breakdown. Um, and I know I've looked at that a long time ago. So things may have changed. Um, but yeah, we could dig up dig up that analysis and try to rerun it.

Donna Givens Davidson 18:47

Yeah, I think it's important for us to get at that number, um, find out from even the 36th district court what percentage of evictions are people being evicted from properties that they purchased through land contracts, or evictions from people who's who violated their lease. I think that we find that it's bigger the uh it's a bigger problem than we imagine. And um so I I want to know, and I know we can't get to know that right away, but it just looks what looks like good news isn't good news when you look at the fact that most low-income people cannot afford to rent quality, affordable um property. And you know, you you see it what some of it is, and you see what people are saying, and so I'm I'm really cute curious about the rest.

SPEAKER_08 19:28

Yeah. Right, absolutely. And I think, yeah, that is that is as as you say, that is a important caveat to these numbers is um you know, this is what we can report on, but we know that there's so much in the housing space that is just not tracked anywhere. Even even trying to track evictions, we know that so many more of evictions happen um without filing an official uh court document, um, either from you know pressure or coercion. Um so there's so much, so much happening in the housing space that just um there's no data to really look at. You've gotta you've got to date out.

Donna Givens Davidson 20:09

Yeah. Well, you know, there's this one woman I worked with, and she was long-come. She rented a house, she was homeless, and she rented a house and people, there was no sink and there was no toilet in the house, and the landlord said, Okay, I'm not putting those in because they'll be stolen. But as soon as you move in, I'll install them. And he didn't. And she had three children, and so um, she was with holding rent trying to demand he paid, and he had people show up in the middle of the night with baseball bats, okay. And all I'm saying is that, you know, and and and she had gotten some support from the state at that time, and the state said, no, you misused your you got evicted because he went through the process of evicting her, and she could not qualify for future, you know, um, support from the state. So I think having looked at the underside, working with people, we're gonna talk about Kim and about the challenges we face and you know, just poverty in general. There's so much exploitation out there, deep exploitation in one of the poorest cities in the nation. And so um my heart is always with those people who don't have options because I consider a safe, um, affordable domicile to be a human right, not a good idea.

SPEAKER_04 21:17

Amen.

SPEAKER_00 21:18

Yeah, this report from Detroit Future City, data driven Detroit, and uh it was funded by the Rocket Community Fund, uh, is online at Detroit FutureCity.com. If you look up 2026 Rental Landscape Report, uh, you will find it. Uh it is Understanding the Land Rental Landscape, a profile analysis of Detroit Landlords. They say that it provides the most comprehensive and up to date analysis of Detroit's landlord landscape. Alex B. Hill of Detroitography. Thank you very much. That was Detroit by the numbers.

Donna Givens Davidson 21:55

Yes, and I I might also add that Rocket is actually also supporting the effort. To get people out of predatory land contracts because Rocket has recognized that as an issue. So I look forward to the data. Maybe we can talk to Rocket about supporting Alex to get that data for us or work with Detroit Future Cities to do the research.

SPEAKER_00 22:16

Yeah, that sounds great. Awesome. Thank you so much, Alex, for joining us.

SPEAKER_08 22:21

Yeah, thanks so much.

SPEAKER_00 22:22

All right. We are going to take a quick break, and when we come back, we're going to talk to Deputy Director for Prosperity for the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity, Kim Trent. Applications have opened for the East Side Community Network Summer Discovery Program. Designed for students entering seventh, eighth, and ninth grade in the fall of 26. This summer experience is a full-day in-person program that combines structured academic learning, hands-on enrichment experiences, and creativity to guide youth in developing life skills related to political and civic engagement, climate change, and environmental justice using art-based expression as a tool for learning and empowerment. The program runs from June 29th to July 31st from 8 30 a.m. to 5 o'clock p.m. Applications close on April 30th. For more details on how to apply, visit ecn-detroit.org slash youth. Welcome back. You are listening to Authentically Detroit. We are here with Deputy Director for Prosperity for the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity, Kim Trent, who is charged with guiding and building support for efforts to boost the economic security of Michigan citizens through policy, strategic initiatives, programs, and partnerships. Her leadership duties at LEO, that's the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity, includes serving as the key staffer to the Michigan Poverty Task Force. She leads the Department's Prosperity Division, which includes the Michigan High Speed Internet Office, Office of Global Michigan, Michigan Women's Commission, excuse me, Michigan Community Service Commission, the Michigan STEM Council, and the Black Leadership Advisory Council. Kim, you also serve as the LEO's Equity and Inclusion Officer. Your career has included leadership roles on the staffs of Congresswoman Carolyn Sheeks Kilpatrick, U.S. Senator Debbie Stabenow, and former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm. For seven years, Kim has helped, has held various key staff positions at Michigan Future Incorporated, a think tank dedicated to boosting prosperity in Michigan. She also serves as an elected member of the Wayne State University Board of Governors. You did that from 13 until 19, correct? Correct. And uh you are here with us today. You are a native Detroiter with Michigan roots that stretch back to the 1830s. Correct. Trent, you hold a bachelor's and master's degree from Wayne State University.

SPEAKER_04 24:59

Co-Warriors.

SPEAKER_00 25:00

You also completed graduate studies at University of Cape Town in Cape Town, South Africa. That was probably pretty cool. It was amazing. Yeah. Kim Trent has completed fellowships with the American Political Science Association in Washington, D.C. and the Michigan Political Leadership Program at Michigan State University, and is a graduate of the Detroit Regional Chambers Leadership Detroit Program. Kim Trent, welcome to Authentically Detroit.

SPEAKER_04 25:25

Thank you so much. That, wow, I gotta make sure I abbreviate that.

Donna Givens Davidson 25:31

No, no, no. But people need to know that about you, right? I think it's always good to know about the accomplishments of women such as yourself that you are well versed and you've done a whole lot, you've been a whole lot of places, and this is not your first time on Authentically Detroit.

SPEAKER_04 25:46

It's not. I I'm actually if I'm upset about anything, is that I'm not here more often. I could I would come every week if I could, or come every um every time you um do a show because it is such um such great information, such smart people asking good questions, and um your audience is sophisticated. So I I would come every day.

Donna Givens Davidson 26:09

And what people don't know about you, I don't know if everybody knows you're a journalist.

SPEAKER_04 26:12

Yeah, I started my career as a reporter at the Detroit News. Yeah, see, I used to brag about this because I thought it made me seem like I had gravitas because my first job was covering the young administration, right? So I used to tell people that, like, yes, I, you know, now I'm like, okay, I that just really makes me sound old.

Donna Givens Davidson 26:33

I gotta take that, you know, wipe that out on my life. You know what? You just just get used to it. Because you just, I was at the the biggest surprise was at when I was at the um State of the City, and the principal of um Mumford High School got up there and said, I'm Nolan Proctor. I was like, what the heck? I remember when you were in high school with my kids. I know you're the principal. And I just immediately felt like I was a hundred. I was like, Nolan Proctor, his father, Fred Proctor, was the principal at Groves when my children went there. So yes, um I've just I've I'm set I'm settling into this, okay?

SPEAKER_00 27:10

Kim, tell me what you learned of the news and probably what's different there now than it was uh when you were there.

SPEAKER_04 27:16

So you know what? I was there at what I think was the the peak of the Detroit News' um influence for black readers because um there was a man named Al Newhart.

SPEAKER_00 27:29

It's never been higher with white readers today. I mean, they they kill it with their Lansing audience. Yeah. I don't know if they serve a Detroit audience at this point.

SPEAKER_04 27:37

Well I I hate to talk about my first employer, but I have to say, um well, I'll just say this. Um it is actually owned again by Gannett. Yes. But when they own when Gannett owned them the first time, Al Newharth was the CR CEO of Gannett. And for some reason, which one day I'm gonna have to read a book or something about him to figure out why, but he was a white man who was very, very interested in DEI in the 80s. Like he and he he was about like not just saying, oh, we need to get more people of color, like being very intentional, giving people bonuses for hiring people of color. So listen, I mean, we would kind of laugh because we had colleagues who had been very, very white, who all of a sudden started coming up with like Native American ancestry and stuff. It's like, oh, okay, you're not just white anymore. Great, you know. But anyway, but but we had so many people of color. Angelo Henderson, who, you know, I know a lot of people still remember Angelo, who's such a great leader and just thinker in our community. But he and and um, oh, there's so many. I I hate to start even dropping names. I worked with Betty DeRamis, who was one of the great writers and geniuses of that Detroit has ever produced.

SPEAKER_03 28:52

Right.

SPEAKER_04 28:52

Um, I worked with um, I mean, just oh God, I so many people who are so smart. And, you know, I we had the National Association of Black Journalists Convention in Detroit in 1994, and there's this very famous the back cover of our program for that. There were like 35 black reporters who were working there at the time. And now I don't, I don't know that.

SPEAKER_00 29:16

Darren Nichols will reference this. Yeah, no, yeah, right. I mean, I've heard of this back cover. I don't know if I've ever seen it, but I've you know, now I'm a horrible package.

SPEAKER_04 29:24

It's somewhere in my house. I haven't seen it in a few years, but when I ever find it again, I'm gonna frame it because it was such a beautiful time. We had black editors and black photographers and black. You know who was a graphic artist at the Detroit News when I was a City Hall reporter? Charles Blow, the columnist for the New York Times, was a graphic artist at the Detroit News. He wasn't even a reporter.

Donna Givens Davidson 29:49

Oh my goodness. I he I used to love him. Yeah, he only made me mad one time. Okay, yes, when he was saying that the Flint City Council was responsible for the water crisis. It was like Did he say that? He did. He, you know, what happens off-brand for him. It is, right? Yeah, yeah. Because I'm like a Charles Blood. I've read both of his books, you know.

SPEAKER_04 30:08

I saw his opera in New York at the um at the Met. He um there was a whole opera about his based on his memoir that was incredible. He yeah, I will that's disappointing. It was to go back and look at that.

Donna Givens Davidson 30:20

I mean, you know, everybody's I'm sure there's somebody who remembers something I said wrong and they'll never forgive me for it. So uh, but I I am a Charles Blow fan. I say that to only say that I'm a big Charles Blow fan, and I didn't know he had um Detroit roots.

SPEAKER_04 30:34

Well he yeah, he that was one of his first journalism jobs was as a um graphic artist at the Detroit man.

Donna Givens Davidson 30:39

Now he's trying to get everybody to move back down to South South. Yeah. It's like okay.

SPEAKER_04 30:42

Yeah, I don't know about that. I I I don't know. I get what he's saying. I understand the point. I understand the demographics of it all. But uh yeah.

SPEAKER_00 30:50

Well, understand the demographics of it all. I I want to talk to you about, you know, uh the Detroit News and Free Press in its current iteration of these what you're describing, right? 35 black there are not 35 black journals. Sure, but editors and web developers and people that did the physical newspaper and you know, the the buttons.

SPEAKER_04 31:11

I will say the free press now, because I gotta give a shout out to my sister. Yeah. Um Nicole, uh you talked about um Darren Nichols, his his lovely wife, who is a force of nature. Nicole Avery um Nichols, who is the the editor of the first black woman editor of the free press. Um and then they have Jump James Hill, who is the top editor.

SPEAKER_00 31:31

So they do have, but there there are four news reporters that are black people for the Detroit Free Press, and there are I believe even less at the Detroit Free Press.

Donna Givens Davidson 31:42

There are fewer reporters, period.

SPEAKER_00 31:45

Talk about that, Kim.

Donna Givens Davidson 31:47

Why is that?

SPEAKER_00 31:48

Well, there's black people here in Detroit. No. And so when it's a matter of Do you do we hire a city council reporter or do we hire an Oakland County reporter? They're going to go where the news paying audience is.

SPEAKER_04 32:01

Um I think they're gonna still hire a Detroit city. I I I think they still, particularly unfortunately, in the wake of what happened in the early 2000s.

Donna Givens Davidson 32:13

That would probably be such a relief. Like if you're going to cover the city, can you cover the city? Very, very close.

SPEAKER_00 32:22

I I I'm bringing in actual real life. There is a reporter that, you know, it's like you move from Denver, Colorado to go work for the Detroit News, and then you're telling all your friends, well, actually, I live 20 minutes outside of Detroit and never cover the city of Detroit ever. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 32:35

Because that's what the Detroit News makes their money off of because they don't make their money from Detroit because they've never tried to give you a little history lesson because it because I knew this person, yeah, and I didn't know about this until after I knew him as a human. Yeah. But there's a very famous memo that was written, I believe, in the either the late 70s or the early 80s, by a guy who, if you met him, lovely guy, but he explicitly said, we are only covering the suburbs, and the only time we're gonna cover the city is when, I mean, it was, it was, you know, if it bleeds, I mean, it was, I've never seen something like this put in into writing. And it was so outrageously racist. And it was so um disheartening for me because this is a person I knew, you know, who I had a relationship, and to know that he harbored those kind of thoughts and that the institution would actually take that as a memo and take it kind of as a game plan for a while. That's why I'm so grateful for the time that I was there because I don't think it was performative. They, you know, that's when the on Detroit um section of the Detroit News started with Luther Keith. And, you know, so there were there were a lot, but you know, it's the history of African-American. The free press has Detroit. Well, the step backwards.

Donna Givens Davidson 33:46

Journalism has taken a step backward. Well, that's true. Journalism is no longer what it was. I do want to acknowledge that, for example, Christine McDonald was at the Detroit News when she broke the story about overtaxation. Yes, a lot of people left the Detroit News and went to the Detroit Free Press because they felt you know there was more of a home. And then we looked at the amazing Kat Stafford to Reuters. I mean, Kat was like a queen on our show a lot, and she did so much good. We need more people in those spaces. Right. But when you have this contracted newsroom, I mean, I love people who work at the free press. When I go to the free press online, all I see are sports stories. It's like we need to have more news stories.

SPEAKER_04 34:31

That's what they've got to that's how they make the money out of the way.

Donna Givens Davidson 34:34

And also, unfortunately, the the things that arrive that arrive on the front page are the most popular stories. And so if you go, you have to search for the news stories. I think that we need to change those um those metrics so that you're not just seeing the top stories, you're seeing important stories.

SPEAKER_04 34:51

But I'm pressure, whoever is doing the layout and figuring out they're doing that based on who's what people are reading the book. Absolutely.

Donna Givens Davidson 34:58

That's exactly that's what it is. But I think, you know, for me, for somebody who does not watch television news, all I have is newspapers. Yeah, and so I'm like digging, and luckily I have friends who work at various newspapers. Now Sam is at the Chronicle writing stuff, and Sam's always breaking his stories. Um but we have um I'm reading, you know, Outlier um I'm reading Bridge Detroit. There's actually an article in Bridge Detroit that um highlighted our work in truck traffic traffic and um air quality today. So I read those stories. Yeah, Planet Detroit. There's people doing good stuff, but you have to search for it.

SPEAKER_00 35:37

Absolutely. And it's I I just think it's a shame that um these two dailies are are in the state that they're in today that you have to have Bridge Detroits and Planet Detroits. Why are those journalists just not?

Donna Givens Davidson 35:48

You know, I think the good news is that it's opening up or democratizing how we get news.

SPEAKER_00 35:54

It's a lot harder for us, though. And it's being in the within the institution makes it a little easier for you to just be able to do that. I'm not trying to be a report.

Donna Givens Davidson 36:01

But not too long ago, I never read the Michigan Chronicle for News. I'm just being straight with you.

SPEAKER_00 36:05

Sure, sure.

Donna Givens Davidson 36:06

Okay. The Michigan Chronicle has become a lot more newsworthy with you working there, number one, because you do write real meaningful news, and I appreciate and honor you for that. Um but also to a certain extent to a certain extent, um, there's a value in being able to get news from non-commercial sources. Correct. News from nonprofit sources or less commercial sources where people are not driven by or controlled by money to interest in the same way. Information used to be filtered in such a way that even with the best people working in some of these newspapers, like you remember when we had the person who was overseeing the free press, I'm not going to name a name, but you know I'm talking about, who was cheering on the bankruptcy and the emergency manager and saying, Hey, there's a black person. But when you have people, what we talk about, black faces in high places, and the black faces in high places are not actually speaking on behalf of the man on the street. I think actually some of the news that we get now is better now that we have these other news sources.

SPEAKER_04 37:13

Well, I know, you know, my husband, um, and actually my my son now um write for a publication called Um Michigan Advance. Well, my husband doesn't anymore, but he did at one point. But it was it's funded by philanthropy to offer news about state government from a progressive perspective. And, you know, I think as much as we talk about how just how um how damaging it is that we have such polarization that we have overcorrected to we're so afraid to just speak truth because you'll be accused truth is now seen as being biased against well, fascism. Guilty as charged, I'm biased against fashion fascism. But I think a lot of people who are in charge of decisions in our nation's newsrooms are so afraid of being accused of that, they're afraid to talk about the truth because the truth is so bizarre that and and we have the people who are decision makers and and the people who are leading us that we don't it's it's it's just a different world. And I think when we look at history and you think how did um you know so many horrible um um movements that we've seen throughout history, and you think about how do regular people go along with it. Well, it starts with institution tearing down institutions first. That's the first step. And so, and one of the most important institutions is the institutions that hold elected officials and powerful people accountable, and that's used to be the media, and I think it is to some extent, but I think as you mentioned, the some of these smaller publications, the black press, you know, the Middle East Chronicle has so much, just so much potential with the black press to be that you you know when I worked on Capitol Hill, they called the Congressional Black Caucus the conscious of the Congress. We're always got to be the conscious of everything in our nation.

SPEAKER_00 39:16

A lot of young black people would completely disagree with that framing today.

SPEAKER_04 39:19

Right. Well, no, yeah, well, we I don't think we should be, but I think that it this is true historically, sure, when you're looking at policy making and holding people and and and calling out it was the black caucus on Capitol Hill that was doing that, you know, that was saying, uh, yeah, what you're gonna do, what you're doing here is going to hurt you know, older people, it's gonna hurt um people of color.

Donna Givens Davidson 39:45

And yeah, they were the only ones crying out. I mean, yeah, I think that there's a lot of distorted information about history too, right? So I'll give an example. Um, when they talk about the crime bill, the black congressional leaders were all in favor and cheering on the crime bill, and the reality is they were really trying to create something else. And so the way that history, you can take something and you can distort it in a way that it doesn't always shed light to younger people on what was actually happening at that time and how things were really framed. Um, you look at right now some of the votes that that happen right now, and people are just going around, um, they are grudgingly voting for certain things, thinking they're gonna get political payoff, but you can't really say that the people who are voting in a lot of instances are the architects of the decision making because it doesn't arise out of their caucus. And some of them I disagree with their decisions, but there's a way of flattening everything. Um but I do want to say that black press has always been important to black liberation. That black press is important to black liberation because power concedes nothing without a demand, and that demand is not going to come from the people who are oppressing you. And black press is different than having black people working for white press, right? Because in a lot of instances, when you're working for white press, you are still expected to maintain a dominant narrative because racism is bipartisan, right? Racism is not about um what your political identification is, it has everything to do with how you interpret other people's value and things, and people have to really work and struggle to be anti-racist, including black people, right? Oh, okay. It's a struggle for every one of us. You have to fight it because it's so normalized inside of our culture. So I will always um believe that it's important for us. You remember we listened to black radio stations, we had WCHB, we had our talk radio. We've always had outlets.

SPEAKER_04 41:42

Well, now we have so when you talk about democratization, like I look at something like Contraband Camp, Michael Harriet, and and just these brilliant young, fresh, well, Michael Harriet, I'm not old. I'm not sure if he's young, but he's not. I don't know if he's I don't know. His perspective is young. You know, he's thinking, um, he's bringing to the table, he's not afraid to talk about like tough topics. So, you know, those those are the kind of things that you would not have had access to before the the internet. So those are the spaces that I'm really grateful for. And and when you you're talking about the how intentional he is, about platforming voices of people who would probably not have any other way to to be heard. So I I, you know, it could be so positive. Unfortunately, there's that downside uh to it too. You know, there's there um and I don't mean about that, I don't mean about news gatherers, but the the um misogyny and you know, the the way that that the algorithms drive you to like really negative spaces too. But I think these folks are doing God's work who are using these platforms to share perspectives that will not be platformed on on any You can never say anything bad about Michael Harriet's me.

Donna Givens Davidson 43:00

Michael Harriet is amazing. Black AF History is one of the best books I've ever read.

SPEAKER_04 43:06

I've chosen for my family, you know. Donna and I are in a book club, but I also have a cousin's book club, and I chose it for my cousin's book club last year, and I was the hero of the day because every single one of us read it or listened to it on on um, you know, like Audible or whatever. No, no, but every single one of them went and bought a hardcover copy of it, and every single one of them went and bought it for their kids and stuff. So they were like, Yeah, this book has impact. Like we've got it, yeah. That book is broken.

Donna Givens Davidson 43:30

We need to have you, did you have you read Black A of History?

SPEAKER_00 43:32

I haven't seen this is you know, you say he's a younger audience, but he's 52. I don't know that he's not a good idea.

Donna Givens Davidson 43:39

But he's he's but he's But I know what I I know what you're referencing. Yes, I've seen the comments. If you have not read it, I I encourage you to read it or listen to it. It is absolutely brilliant and funny. It is so much fun. We listened to it. Kevin and I were driving out of town and we were just listening to it all the way. And we're you know, when he's talking about the the cookbook or whatever, and he's talking about soul food. Right. And you know, he's absolutely brilliant. And he felt so funny. So I encourage it. And he does have a pretty young audience. There's a lot of younger people who he brings in. So I don't think age age is a good thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's also a mindset. Correct. As a youthful career. That's what I mean.

SPEAKER_03 44:18

As a youthful, that's what I mean.

Donna Givens Davidson 44:19

Exactly.

SPEAKER_04 44:20

And I think also that some of that is born because a lot of his career he actually worked on college campuses. So I think when you're around young people, that does you do get the vibe. You get the, you know, you can get their energy and kind of figure figure out what's important to them. So yeah, he is 53. And but it and he's kind of an interesting character because he kind of has a old skull soul, but he also is very hipping of the moment. And I just love that guy.

Donna Givens Davidson 44:44

Yeah, he's he's and it, you know, I love the Gullah Geechee part. Yeah. I love what he describes and we uses the language and he really exposes you to a part of black Southern history because I'm a northern girl. You know, your people have been here since 1830. I thought my people had been here for a minute. Um, but I don't have any relatives down south. I don't need to never have. I don't either. You just go across the city.

SPEAKER_04 45:07

You know what? I have some who are going down there, but they have no family down there, but they just, you know, they want a warmer climate climate or whatever. But like they're not going down there to hook up with cousins so and so because we ain't got no cousins down there.

Donna Givens Davidson 45:20

All our cousins are in Michigan or you know, around here. So yeah, same. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So it I encourage that. Um, but we we need to talk about because you made this turn from journalism to politics. And you, when I met you the first time, you were working for um Governor Grantholm. So talk about that U-turn or that slight turn. What was it like?

SPEAKER_04 45:48

Um, so actually, my first job in politics was working for Congresswoman Carolyn Kilpatrick on Capitol Hill. Um, I was there during the whole, God, I'm really aging myself. So I was there doing the Clinton administration. So um I remember being on elevators where people had like on a Friday night, everybody had a stack of papers this thick and it was the Ken Star Report. They wanted to go home and read like the filthy parts of the Ken Star report. So like I was on the hill um during some pretty interesting times. Um the first, you know, when Newt Gingrich was there doing his horrible thing. So, you know, I I started there and then came back here, um worked for her in her Detroit office, and then worked for um Senator Debbie Stabener, um, which was really such an important part of my career. I I think that the growth I had from that experience um really set the tone. Well, my grandmother was a social worker. She had an MS, she was an MSW, owned a mental health clinic, worked in the Detroit public schools as a social worker. And having a grandmother who's a social worker has really shaped your dad's mother? This is my mother's mother. So it's on both sides. That you have clinical. Yeah, because you're talking about your dad and the medical. And so um I come from a family where service is really important and where understanding and I think I I have always had also I should tell you, I grew up in Highland Park, Michigan, because that's an important part of my origin story. Growing, I grew up in I was laughing when I was thinking uh uh um about when you talked about trees. Because when I grew up in Highland Park, it was called the City of Trees.

Donna Givens Davidson 47:28

What street were you on?

SPEAKER_04 47:29

I was on Louise, Louise between Woodward and Second. And um our I lived on a street where we had the mayor lived on our street, we had professionals, we had a man who actually did the who picked up the garbage on our very street. We had people who worked in the plants, we had people, we had every kind of black person there was. And when we first moved, I was only, we were only the third black family who moved on our street because we moved there fairly early. Um but it was I it took until I was in my 40s to really understand how important having that mixture of different kinds of people, people who were educated, people who weren't educated, people who had um, you know, professional jobs, people who picked up garbage, but everybody. It was such a beautiful that's the book I want to write one day.

Donna Givens Davidson 48:25

I was like I would love to do it. I lived on Pennington. Yeah. And it was the same thing. We had auto workers, we had some people, um, a teacher, bus driver, clerks. My next door neighbor was Dr. Slaughter. Uh my dad was a doctor, and we all lived there, and it was like a storybook neighborhood. I absolutely loved living on Pennington. I was just telling my husband about it. But we also had like criminals, and their last name was crooks. So little on the nose. And so my sister, my sister emotion, shows somebody's a bully, right? And so she would um she would always try to beat people up, and she was little, but she was really strong and she could beat everybody up. And so Bunny in, we need to know what's telling Trigly somebody, my sister's gonna beat your brother. I'm like, okay, it's my sister went up there with her fist, let me come up with a gun. That was like the beginning of the breakdown of their relationship.

unknown 49:27

Oh my god.

Donna Givens Davidson 49:28

But it was that that thing, and you know, and and we had teachers. And so I went to Bagley Elementary, I walked to school. Yeah, my friend Julie's mother walked, worked at the school. There were teachers. It was a very um inclusive neighborhood, and I loved living there.

SPEAKER_04 49:43

I was so grateful for my Highland Park roots. I mean, really. I I, you know, I'm always shocked when I, I mean, you know, obviously Highland Park has gone through some really difficult times. But I'm always shocked when I tell people I'm from Highland Park and they kind of go, hmm, Highland Park, you know, I'm like, my neighborhood was awesome. What are you talking about?

Donna Givens Davidson 49:59

My brother-in-law, I have no My brother-in-law lived on Easton. Yeah, oh yeah, he lived on Easton just like about a block over from Woodward. And on New Year's Eve, his parties were legendary. He's Filipino, so they were the Filipino family, the Desmonds, who lived on Easton. And his Filipino aunts and mothers, they have this spread of Patrick Lindsay, is his best friend. Okay, okay. So they they went to Michigan together, they're alphas, they were on the same alpha line, Ego One. Um Patrick grew up in Holland Park, too. He's what I'm saying. Well, they were they were best friends from high school. Okay, yeah. And yeah, so that's where I met Patrick, PO. Right? So I have nothing but love. And then I had friends who lived on Moss. Okay. And second, the Coldens. Oh, the Coldens.

SPEAKER_04 50:47

Yes. He was my my high sch my um elementary school principal. Okay. And Kim and Kelly um walked us to school. Um, it was so wholesome when I was growing up. I lived on Louise, which was two blocks up from Moss. When I was in kindergarten, I walked by myself from Louise to, and then I would pick up Kim and Kelly, and they would walk me the rest of the way too. Um, but when I think about it, I'm like, I would never have let my five-year-old walk even two blocks. And, you know, as a mother today. I remember reading Michelle Obama's book, and she talked about her mother gave her like an alarm clock when she was in kindergarten. It was like, okay, so from now on, it's on you. You're gonna get up and I was like, that's crazy. And then I thought about it's like, that kind of happened to me too. Now that I think about the last key generation, but yeah, no, and I mean Highland Park, that it's a very, it was a very charming experience I had.

Donna Givens Davidson 51:38

And it was a black city, even though it, I mean, we saw it turn. Now I have to be honest, I was fascinated with Highland Park High School. Yeah. Because it had no windows.

SPEAKER_00 51:46

Still am. I mean, it's a huge building.

Donna Givens Davidson 51:48

When I was in that building, okay, but you don't understand, it may have been awful. But when I went in Highland Park High School and had all those skylights and the plants and everything like that, I've never seen a school with skylights. And so I I know everybody talks about not having windows.

SPEAKER_04 52:03

I didn't look like a prison.

Donna Givens Davidson 52:04

But it didn't put it in.

SPEAKER_04 52:08

I took I took driver's training there. So I was in the house.

Donna Givens Davidson 52:13

I don't know if I finished there, but I went there for driver's street. I don't know how, but I I went in and it just blew my mind. I was like, wow, this is so pretty. And then afterwards, I started, you know, but everybody laughed at being the school without windows.

SPEAKER_02 52:24

Right, right.

Donna Givens Davidson 52:25

Um, and and you know, um, so many people I know went there, graduated from there. Oh, yeah. A lot of very successful people.

SPEAKER_00 52:31

Give me a picture of this school without windows because I'm looking at the abandoned, you know, people, the the urban explorers. But is this what you're looking at?

Donna Givens Davidson 52:39

Underneath these skylights, you had all this greenery right in the middle of the woods? Yeah. Yes. And so you're walking in and there's like this green.

SPEAKER_00 52:48

So it was like a mall.

Donna Givens Davidson 52:49

Yes. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 52:50

Yes.

Donna Givens Davidson 52:50

It really was like a really good point to say it was like a mall. And so for me, I was at Mercy High School. Right. And you know, Mercy had windows everywhere. Right. Um, but we didn't have that greenery, courtyard and stuff like that. I just I thought it was fascinating.

SPEAKER_04 53:04

I don't know if that was just a Highland Park thing because our house to this day, like my father's apartment, his condo, just ridiculous amount of plants everywhere. I thought, I think that was kind of a 70s thing, too. Like we, which is a good thing, by the way. But yeah, it every house that I can think of, even on my street, everybody had floor-to-ceiling plants and you know, yeah. So that's it.

Donna Givens Davidson 53:25

My mother was like that, and you know, Kevin is like that. Yeah. Um he's he grows everything. Right. Um, but my mother had like we had a um bay window in our dining room. My mother built a box in in front of the bay window. Oh. She put sand and dirt in the bay window, and we grew flowers there, and it was like a greenhouse. Oh my goodness. And then we get hanging plants over it. And so, yeah, I mean that whole plant life. Yeah. And when we didn't even understand at the time the value of indoor air quality when you had that kind of plant life. Yeah. Um, but we came from rural people. Yeah. We also, you know, grew tomatoes, cucumbers, we strawberries.

SPEAKER_04 54:03

We always had a garden in our house in Highland Park. We always had my parents grew corn, they grew green, just everything, every kind of um plant that you can, or every kind of vegetable you can think of. Then they also had um a flower garden, but they always had a vegetable garden. My father actually lived in a condo, and he made them get a vegetable garden in his condo building because he was, you know, he's from Charlotte, Michigan, so he's from the country. And, you know, they grew everything that they ate pretty much.

Donna Givens Davidson 54:32

So, you know, I want to come back when we we we have to take a break because I want to come back and I want to talk about how your childhood experiences, mine in Detroit, in a Detroit where it felt very much like it was a city on the rise, yeah, plays into your role in the poverty task force and where that where that motivation comes from.

SPEAKER_04 54:51

Okay. I'd love to talk about that.

SPEAKER_00 54:53

We'll be right back.

SPEAKER_01 54:58

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SPEAKER_00 55:34

Welcome back. You are listening to Authentically Detroit. We are here with Kim Trent. We want to talk, Kim, about uh what you do uh with the state, the Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity. When we uh went on our break just a moment ago, we were talking about Highland Park High School.

Donna Givens Davidson 55:52

And just the childhood, just this childhood, because I remember being happy as a no, I wasn't necessarily I loved living in Detroit. I loved riding my bike. I ride my bike to Highland Park, I ride my bike everywhere. And there was this sense of a beautiful city that people outside of Detroit looked at as being, you know, it was abandoned by white people, but we were still here. And we enjoyed it. We were living in nice houses on nice blocks. And we're now living in a city where poverty has become concentrated and you don't have that same type of economic diversity.

SPEAKER_04 56:29

Well, that's what I was gonna say. Yes. That's what I was gonna say. I think that that my origin story has kind of informed my approach to because first of all, we live in a country that very much vilifies poor people. It's just been a part of the American narrative. You didn't try hard enough, you didn't do enough, you're lazy, you know, and and a lot of us have absorbed those messages, right? So there's this blame that goes on without looking at the picture of how society has set has been set up to make winners and losers. So and so when I got this opportunity um to lead the state's anti-poverty work, um, you know, with the um poverty task force, I think about first of all, I don't looking back now, I recognize that some of my peers growing up would probably be categorized as poor. But we didn't even have the language for it because they were just people. They were my friends, they were my friends' parents. And I just don't have that, I don't have that lens. And so the first thing I think we have to do is unpack why we have that lens and how wrong it is. Because that it's so much a part of who we are as Americans and our origin story and and what we tell ourselves about what it means to be Americans. We it's it's just like um when people talk about uh race and the invisibility of privilege. It it's the same thing with the the invisibility of um the privilege you have of not being a poor person in our in our society.

SPEAKER_06 58:02

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_04 58:03

And the way that we sell ourselves whatever guilt that we may feel about it is by saying people, some people deserve to be poor. And so now we have leaders who are forwarding that message again. I mean, we had people a long time where people maybe weren't saying it. It was just kind of the accepted truth. Um, I was so excited to have a governor who said, let's talk about how we end poverty, let's be intentional about it. Let's be intentional about raising income for people and lowering costs for people so that they can live with dignity and and have you know quality housing. Like you said, qu housing is not some kind of privilege that somebody should have. It's an absolute human right. Um, good health care is a human right. You know, she talked about race being a um uh uh a um uh public health issue, the racism being a public health issue in our in our, you know, saying the things, saying the things. It's revolutionary to just say the things. And so to devote money and brain power to addressing it, I thought was really important. And I'm really happy to see, you know, with with Mayor Sheffield being really intentional, bringing in people like Luke Schaefer and Benita Miller and you know, all these people who are nationally recognized experts who know how to, you know, Luke Schaefer who created RX Kids and all these other who wrote these brilliant books.$2 a Day was one of the first books I read when I got this job, because it's like to re to recognize abject poverty exists where we live. Like people are living in this, you know, we have a safety net so that maybe we don't have people who have to like maybe you're not seeing what you would see in Calcutta or Lagos or, you know, but people are still living in horrible conditions and we have trained ourselves to look away.

Donna Givens Davidson 59:56

We have people who live outside of safety nets. We have people living on the streets. We have people living in places right now where you fizz theoretically have shelter. And Sam was looking, where was the apartment building that you went to, Sam? Um, where the people had been thrown out and then they were let back in, but then they were pushed out again and they weren't allowed to get their things, and you went through there.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:18

The Leland House.

Donna Givens Davidson 1:00:19

The Leland House. Oh, downtown. Yes. We have people living in places an absolute squalor. And so um I was here one Saturday, and it was after we were closed. I was here with Kevin. We were bringing in the furnishings for here because we got to um to IKEA, and we had some stuff we were bringing here. And while we're here, the space This looks amazing, by the way.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:42

It really looks good. The your lobby and everything, and it's looking really every time I come, it looks better and better. Yeah, yeah.

Donna Givens Davidson 1:00:48

Well, and you know, hats off to the team at ECN. But we were um decorating the space, and I walked walked outside and I saw this lady had a grocery cart and she was standing at our door. It's Saturday, it's about four o'clock. We have somewhere to be at five o'clock. And she asked us if we have any food. And so, no, but let me find a place for you. Right. There were no places that fed people until Monday morning. Do you know how it felt to watch this woman? So, you know, you have to give her some money because without that, she's not eating until Monday morning. And so, what do people do? They end up going through garbage cans and things like that, trying to live, and we pretend like we don't see it.

SPEAKER_06 1:01:30

Yep, right.

Donna Givens Davidson 1:01:31

There's people who are going to the store and feeding themselves with dog food and cat food because that's food that they can afford. And so I think if we understand the dimensions of poverty that we have here and be a little bit less congratulatory about the fact that there are safety nets, because everybody's not safe inside of those nets.

SPEAKER_04 1:01:47

But no, but what's happening? I mean, first of all, you're right. Our safety nets, we did a whole report about TANF, how TANF dollars are used in in Michigan. So we know we had quote unquote welfare reform that radically undermined any kind of safety net aspect that you would have with how TANF dollars are distributed. And then state of Michigan leaders said, hold my beer, we're gonna make it even worse here. So, you know, horrible restrictions that were put on by the federal government, we came in and made it even harder for people to get the help that they need, to get it for as long as they needed it, to get to not have to jump through a thousand bureaucratic um hoops to get it. I mean, we we have created a system that is designed for people to not get help, really, to be honest with you. So we one of the things that poverty task force did was commission a report from the University of Kansas. And I don't think any people, anyone who's been watching would be surprised by the findings. Um there are policy decisions. Again, these are decisions that are gonna be. Older Michiganders are are um are not getting help. The bureaucratic nightmare that we've set up to make and and by the way, what has what's happening with the federal government now, it's gonna make it a thousand times worse.

Donna Givens Davidson 1:03:16

So let's talk about TANF for a minute. Temporary aid for needy families. I started working at Warren Kind of Development Coalition, which is this organization and its old name. Sure, sure. Um, like me, it's had a couple names, name changes. Um, when I worked here in '93, 86% of income-qualified families could get aid-to-dependent children. It was not enough, but they had access to it. Right now, it's something like 13% of income-qualified families are receiving those types of benefits. So welfare is um and and the benefit amounts have not changed substantially since 1993.

SPEAKER_04 1:03:57

And so we had a bit of a bump in the last couple years, but before that, it was like you said, it was before it was the 90s. Now just imagine if you were living, well, you wouldn't weren't even born probably, but you know, just imagine we were living off the same budget that we had in 1994, just in your own personal life.

Donna Givens Davidson 1:04:14

You go back and you look at because I always do the number you always have to like do the inflation adjustment. Oh, yeah. Because a lot of times, like, you know, certain things don't make sense. But I want to go back to the TANF piece because I learned through working and being on your advisory committee what percentage of federal TANF dollars has gone into helping needy families. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:04:35

Yeah. What's the yeah, less than yeah, less than that actually goes in? It's like the six percent that's actually going to percent six. That it's actually going to people to help them. Six.

Donna Givens Davidson 1:04:48

So a lot of it is going, yeah. Oh yeah. Six percent. I want people to hear that number. Yeah. We're spending money on 10. If where's the rest of it going?

SPEAKER_04 1:04:56

So um administrative costs for a long time, and this is one thing that I'm proud of, we had something called merit scholarships in the state, and all you had to do was get a good score on a standardized test. Now, who's more likely to get that? Those are people who live going to school in West Bloomfield and you know, in these um high, so you're gonna so that's considered, so they were taking money from TANF, which is meant for the neediest people in our state. That money was being diverted to very rich people so they can go to college wherever they wanted to go. You didn't have to go to school in Michigan. So if you wanted to go to Yale and your parents were billionaires, they could get dollars from a mayor scholarship. Those are the that's how those are the how how we we were diverting the people.

Donna Givens Davidson 1:05:40

What about other dollars?

SPEAKER_04 1:05:42

Um we um job training. So um, well, there was some some with that. But then also um we diverted a lot of the money to things like um um uh what am I um when your children when when um child protective services in those cases. Of things, those kind of services.

Donna Givens Davidson 1:06:02

So dollars that you know that used to be kind of general fund dollars, they said, I mean, it just became kind of where people would just pay for a whole bunch of different kinds of so child protective services that is akin to having the dollars meant to keep people in their homes used to demolish homes to spend money that was meant to keep people, families intact on programs designed to remove kids or monitor kids for a removal, yeah, um, feels like it is actually reversing the purpose of those dollars. Absolutely. And it is destabilizing families because we know families need to live. And we know that um in this time frame, things, basic needs like water has become more expensive, and we have these water shutoffs. And if you have a child and you cannot afford water, what's the problem?

SPEAKER_04 1:06:51

Right, then your child is gonna get removed in all likelihood. Yes, and then you know, he's gonna be able to do that. So we have criminalized poverty for sure. You know, so that's that's another thing. So yeah, you're right. I mean, it is, it's it definitely seems um uh, you know, if you're gonna be charitable, probably not the best way to spend money. But really, if you're being honest, it's actually the worst way when you're thinking about um um you know kind of strategies to to end poverty. Or for example, one of the things that we did with our tan-up dollars, for example, we made it so uh punitive. So if so, for example, if you have three meetings with your caseworker that you missed or that you're late, well, I think it was missed, you would be banned from getting tan-up dollars forever from the state of Michigan. Now, think of all the reasons why someone who is low income might miss a meeting. Lack of transportation, lack of job flexibility, like being able to get time off, or to take all of these things, illness, sick child, all of these things that could, and so when if you make a choice that this other thing is more important, you are risking your child and your family being able to get, and mind you, as you mentioned, the the way the dollars are allocated, it is anybody who thinks people, you know, the whole um welfare queen trope thinks that people are using dollars from TANF to get rich. Man, you haven't looked at those dollars lately. They they're getting nothing. Nobody could live could just live off of just TANF. Like very few people would be able to do, or if they did it, they're living in substandard housing, they're living in with barely being able to buy enough food. They're struggling.

Donna Givens Davidson 1:08:40

You know, I have this dream television show, Survivor, where all the people who talk about poor people are given TANF dollars and told they have to survive for three months, okay? Yeah. I that idea is so exciting to me. I want you to see how you can do it because you gotta heads off to that show. It would be a great show, and it would possibly change public policy. Hats off to those people who don't understand how brilliant some mothers have to be and fathers have to be, just to navigate these systems so their children can eat and have medical care and the things that they need. We minimize their struggles. And one of the challenges is narrative. And again, this goes back to the importance of black press. This goes back to the importance of storytelling because without the right storytelling, what ends up happening is the reason these people are poor is because their parents are using their money to buy wheat and hair weave, and that's the reason why these kids aren't eating. Um, I remember when um the late ungrate Bill, oh well he's still alive, when Bill Cosby was um was started his respectability tour. Oh, yes. And he was like, he remember his saying, the poor are letting down our communities. And he was coming out there and saying, you know, these people are buying hooked on, they need to buy hooked on phonics, but they're buying these gym shoes for their kids. And at the time, I'm working in the north end with kids who don't have coats warm enough to keep them warm, they're not wearing designer coats. They're they don't have coats. So I'm I'm taking my kids, and we got we had this opportunity to go to Seldon Blues, and Alexander Sanji gave us tickets. Oh, nice. And so, of course, I bring my kids. And I remember Camille had a baby fat jacket on. And the kids who I was working with looked at her with so much just envy like, oh my god, how do you have that? And I felt so incredibly guilty for my daughter having a baby fat jacket, and these kids didn't, and she I didn't even buy that for her, her stepmom did, but regardless, she had it. And my kids had the proper clothing and they didn't. And at that same time, here's you know, Bill Cosby contributing to this narrative, and when it's it's us saying that about our own people, then it makes that narrative that much more believable. Um, so I have to say that when his downfall came, I was not one of the people who cried for him, not for that and many reasons. I felt like, you know, popularizing these myths about poor people is so damaging. I know even back, we're talking about 2004, 2005, kids who lived in houses without heat, kids who had never been to the doctor. And the amount of suffering young people, I used to go home, drive home from work, and feel guilty for being warm inside my house because there were people who were who were not. And so um, and at that time, you couldn't even say the word poor. Right. Yeah, yeah. Unless you wanted to put them down. And so we're now here, it's 2026. And you've been doing this for six years, and you have some things that you have been able to do in your role. Now you haven't fixed poverty, but you've done some things. Talk about what you've done.

SPEAKER_04 1:11:58

So um, I think one of the most consequential changes that we have is the earned income tax credit, which um we uh we had a match when it was originally introduced in the early 2000s of um it was um 20%. And then when the Snyder administration came in, they bumped it down to 6%. And so we actually um when we first came in, that was one of the first things we said, like we got to get that back up to 20%. We gotta fight for it. And I have to tell you, not everybody was a big fan of that idea because, you know, budgets have to be balanced, and oh, well, that's you know, is that a priority? Yes, it is a priority. We got to do it. And we ended up um, there was a coalition of a number of external partners who fought for it, um, working with us, um working with uh people inside of state government, and that was one of the first bills when we had the, when I say we, I I mean I am a I am a Democrat. So when there was this um trifecta where we had both the the governors, um, we had the governor and the House and the Senate, one of the very first bills they passed was boosting it up to 30% of the federal um EITC. So that was um huge. That was a huge game changer. Um has really had um great impact. Our ex-kids, which um uh Mayor Sheffield is bringing to uh Detroit now, but started in Flint. Um, you know, using tariff dollars to support, and you know, obviously philanthropy got involved too, but to support the idea that we know that the first year of a child's life is the most important time, um a woman's pregnancy. Um we know that we have uh terrible, terrible um black uh infant, if both infant mortality and uh maternal um death rates are just off the charts. And so we know that money, everybody's like, oh, money doesn't solve everything. Well, money solves a lot. If you have access to uh be able to go to the doctor, if you've had access to be able to get good quality food, if you have the ability to have transportation, if you those are things that are gonna contribute to you having a healthier pregnancy and for your child's first year of life to be a healthier and and better time. And so um to have RX kids um supported, that was something that we um uh were very um very supportive of and and seeing that it's going to other communities now is really very gratifying. Um the fact that every school children, every school child in Michigan now has access to free breakfast and lunch, which sounded like a pipe dream a few years ago, but it's something we've now had for three years.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:50

And now Republicans are trying to take that away.

SPEAKER_04 1:14:52

Yeah, well, yeah. I mean they're gonna they're gonna I mean it's always a fight. It's always a fight.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:57

So from the rich kids. They don't want the rich kids to to have because that's a waste of money to them. They don't they don't want to be able to do that.

SPEAKER_04 1:15:02

Well, but there's not a district in in Michigan where that is all rich, and that's the thing that they don't understand. They don't understand the sh the shame that um people who really rely on those meals to be able to eat.

Donna Givens Davidson 1:15:15

As a person who used to manage schools, I can tell you that a large proportion of people do not complete the free and reduced lunch applications because they're afraid of the government intruding on their lives. So you have a whole lot of kids who qualify but who don't have it. And so I think that, you know, and then you have kids who aren't eating at home. Well, if if the the breaking bread and giving people food is like the the if that's the most harmful thing you can do, it's so crazy to me because we have we we have no compunctions about going to war and just bombing the hell out of people's lives and stuff like that. And it's like we can always find money for that. I need trillions and trillions of dollars to go to war. Right.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:55

Your your argument talking about the the um sort of social stigma around it is something that all often gets brought up by advocates when I went to elementary school in 2005. I remember that was a big um it was a social stigma. You were labeled by your fellow first and second graders as the who goes in line before the sort of majority of the kids in Midland, Michigan who didn't qualify for free or reduced lunch, but it was certainly a top of mind social stigma among peers. And so that's has been eliminated.

SPEAKER_04 1:16:29

It has been. And it's a good thing, it's a very good thing. So, I mean, everything that all of the innovations that I think we fought for over the last six years are in danger of just being wiped off the, you know, um uh because so much of the money that we get is from the federal government. There's so many stipulations that this uh leader in Washington has put on how we use those dollars. Well, that I I definitely meant quotation marks for all that word.

Donna Givens Davidson 1:17:00

But you know what I'm hoping? Yeah, I'm hoping that that group of people who are supporting these things are in danger. I know they think that by stopping black folks and Hispanic people from voting, but I have a hard time believing a lot of this is popular among the people they consider their base. Um there's just too many things and too much suffering going on, and that's the only way we're gonna stop this is to get people more aware, more conscious, and when it's hitting them in the same way. I mean, you have the threats to Medicaid and Medicare are not hurt hurting urban poor people as much as they are rural poor people. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_04 1:17:39

And those are your best. And by the way, uh most of the very poor uh counties in the state of Michigan are rural counties. I mean, rural poverty is a real problem in our state, and and um there is this definition when people think about poverty, they have a very uh definite idea of what poverty looks like. And it looks like us, the people in this room, it looks like uh meaning black people and women, and I mean all of the stereotypes that go back to Ronald Reagan and and you know, welfare queens and this idea, and that is not the reality. That is not that is not the face of poverty.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:16

Every single uh, you know, well um you know upper middle class, wealthy community, every single one has neighbors who are poor in poverty, are low income, however you want to describe it, uh, from Midland to Gross Point Park to West Bloomfield to Traver City. It's a good one.

Donna Givens Davidson 1:18:38

And then you go to places like Baldwin, Michigan, which is right next to Idawild. Idawild. Okay, so growing up we went to Idawild, and Kevin and I went to a jazz festival in Baldwin, Michigan. And I'm like, do they have grocery stores anymore?

SPEAKER_04 1:18:51

One of the poorest counties in the state of Michigan. It's always in the top three.

Donna Givens Davidson 1:18:57

It's like everybody's eating out of dollar stores. I was like, if I ate at dollar stores, I'd be angry too. And you're driving through these parts and you can't get cell phone signals anywhere. Well, I can't get a cell phone signal. You don't have access to basic things. And I'm looking at these people living in trailers stuck behind trees and they got these American flags there because they believe in a lot of instances the reason they're so poor is because people in Detroit are getting everything. And one of the reasons they're so angry is they believe that they've been cut out of the American dream and that we are living it. And in a lot of instances, we believe they're living the American dream. If we can only see each other, one of the things we've talked about is doing the kind of work where you're going out into various communities and helping build awareness, not political awareness, but just awareness about what's really happening in our state. Where is that going right now? What are your thoughts on that? I mean, I think so.

SPEAKER_04 1:19:52

I um one of the one of the programs that I've managed also is the um Office of Rural Prosperity. So um they have, I think the leaders of that group, one of the things that we do is we we work on the ground with these rural communities and have them identify what are the things. So, you know, there's some communities that don't have high-speed internet or don't have, you know, and they get to decide for themselves what are the things that we need in our community. And then we don't just throw money at the problem, but we give them resources, we give them um technical assistance, we give, you know, but one of the things we do is we often connect them with urban folks so that they understand, you know, so they can learn from what we've already learned. You know, we've been in the laboratory maybe a little bit longer for this anti-poverty work. And I think that those are the kinds of connections when you have leaders in those communities who are learning from leaders in our community, those are the kind of things that I think will help us build, and they're just having the conversations. Um, even among our our um, you know, when when I talked about the earned income tax credit, we brought we brought the corporate sector into that conversation because they once they really realize this is an incentive to work because you only get to earn income tax credit if you earn income. So, you know, people sometimes have to see what's in it for them, but sometimes you will occasionally run across across somebody who is, does have empathy. I mean, that does happen occasionally. So, but they're not gonna have empathy if they don't know, you know, and so I just think having the door open so you can always have conversations, even with people who you would assume would not necessarily have empathy for the people you're advocating for.

Donna Givens Davidson 1:21:39

Yeah, I you know, Kevin and I were in Nuego in 2020, and everybody was super friendly. There was this one lady who tried, she was in a wheelchair and she chased him through the girl, she started telling him he was an angel. You're an angel. Nobody was rude to us. Everybody was nice. Yeah. It was not interpersonal hostility. Yeah. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:04

Yeah.

Donna Givens Davidson 1:22:04

The hostility comes from a lot of times um miseducation, misinformation. And the more that we can humanize each other, I'm an optimist who just believes that people, most people have goodness inside of them. And when they aren't showing empathy, it's because they don't understand the issues. Right. Um, when you talk about teaching people rural, when I was in Idaho, we my grandmother lived up there for a few years. And so she would take us around, and they were like farm stands. We go get our eggs from somewhere, and we get our tomatoes from somewhere, and so we ate, you know, from people growing things around there.

SPEAKER_04 1:22:39

Yeah.

Donna Givens Davidson 1:22:40

I didn't see any farm stands, and that's the thing that got me. Like we have urban agriculture. Sometimes we need rural agriculture, not corporate farms, but places where poor people in rural communities are growing their own food so that they can eat fresh foods, because it is literally, I cannot imagine wanting to live in a place where nothing, everything comes out of a can.

SPEAKER_04 1:23:01

Yeah, and it is it's it's counterintuitive too, because you think when you think of rural, you think of access to fresh food and that kind of stuff. But you're right, it's sometimes it's the exact opposite because they don't have a system to distribute the, you know, uh, you know, those fresh foods and vegetables, and and people aren't able to make a living maybe necessarily with it. Or the land is used for these mega farms, you know, there's so they're not like the family farm where you're just going out and you're selling your peaches or you're selling your your plums or your carrots or whatever. Um they're becoming fewer and farther between.

Donna Givens Davidson 1:23:37

Yeah, so it's like sort of like international aid. When I was in high school, um, we had this class called social consciousness. And in social consciousness, that's where we learned about um baby formula and how certain companies were going into um at that time they called them third world nations. I think they call them developing, in other words, places that that that white folks exploit around the world and selling them baby formula, infant formula. And so the women's milk would dry up and then they were dependent on infant formula, but they couldn't afford it, so they were watering it down, it was contributing to child hunger. We create dependencies. We create dependencies, and when you create those types of dependencies, then people lose the capacity to do it for themselves. Again, in Detroit, we grew food. Yeah, we ate food in our garden. And we could afford food. We just my mother just preferred the food because it tastes better.

SPEAKER_04 1:24:29

It tastes better and it's better for you. Yeah.

Donna Givens Davidson 1:24:31

That has become and and then I had children and I wasn't growing stuff. Okay, I'll admit I was not as good as my mother at those things, right? Right. I should have kept that practice.

SPEAKER_04 1:24:41

Yeah, no, that's something I feel a lot of guilt about too that I haven't done it.

Donna Givens Davidson 1:24:44

Yeah, so now, you know, my children are having to learn for themselves things. We pass, we we failed to pass on generational lessons because we thought, well, I'll just go to a grocery store. And when the grocery store is dried up, then we are now dependent on something that's no longer there as a resource. Right. And it has nothing to do with land, and you go to a lot of now whatever we call developing nations, same thing. People are hungry, but they could grow their own food.

SPEAKER_04 1:25:06

I just read, I just watched a video about chow chow. Um, like my grandpa grandmother made chow chow, which was like this pickled vegetable kind of yeah. And my grandmother canned like crazy, like she canned her whole life, like you know, until she died. I don't know that anybody from my generation really does that. And when you just think about how it is a skill that would, if we had it, I mean, the the way you could preserve good, high-quality, dense food, um, and we just lost that. We we we lost that as an ability to to really feed our families in a way that was really responsible. Um, you know, you and you inspired me, I should tell you. We had a conversation, you know, you're you serve on our um advisory council for the poverty task force. So one of the things that we are talking about is innovate. How do you innovate in a time of crisis like we're in right now? And so we, I mean, this, I don't know if we're gonna go with this title, but we actually want to do a half-day summit on it. And one of the ideas that we want what one of the names that I thought about is building in the backlash. Because in the history of black people in this country, you know it's been like a decade or two of progress and then like 60 years of backlash. And so we're in the backlash now, right? Um, but we still have to be, and we're in backlash. I to be honest with you, I feel like I'm pretty savvy about the history of race in this culture, but I'm not gonna lie, I was not, I was not prepared for Donald Trump. I just did not the just the naked racism and naked, I just did not see that coming. I'll be honest. I I did not I I certainly am not naive about the fact that racism has always flourished and we and you know, pr white privilege flourished, and but I never thought I'd see the day um where we have a president who's you know displaying images of a past black president as a as a primate and that kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:09

What if I told you it was only gonna get worse and worse as a few years?

SPEAKER_04 1:27:12

But that's what I'm in the background.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:14

I'm saying my peers, when I grew up in Midland, right? I mean I felt it. And so this surprise, this shock is just like this is how white people are.

Donna Givens Davidson 1:27:21

But this is but this is a thing that happens in history. And as a poli sci major, let me just bring some of those dust off that, you know.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:29

Right.

Donna Givens Davidson 1:27:30

History goes in in a hundred years ago, Hoover was president. Hoover was racist as hell. Yes, he was. We had Hoover Villes, we had no social programs, people were starving, whatever. And Hoover produced FDR.

SPEAKER_04 1:27:44

Right.

Donna Givens Davidson 1:27:45

And That's the point I was gonna make.

SPEAKER_04 1:27:48

You actually gave I did a whole speech based on a conversation you had when you were bucking me up one day where I was just like, oh, how are we gonna get through this? Where you talked about the growth that came out of these periods of deep desperation. And how those were laboratories for innovation. And so that's why we want to have that conversation now because, you know, it's easy to fall into a feeling of hopelessness. I mean, just because, you know, certainly this isn't the first time that we've experienced lack in our country. But I, you know, most of my life, we have been in a period of, you know, where you saw African-Americans. I mean, we've always had issues. And growing up in Detroit, like you said, I had tremendous pride about growing up in the city. You know, people who aren't from here might look at, oh, cracked dens. That's not the Detroit. That's not what I think of in Detroit. I think of power. I think of influence. I think of intellectual. Uh, I mean, just when you think about people like um James and Grace Boggs. And I mean, just my grandfather, who had a high school education, is one of the most brilliant people I've ever met, who sat on a bar stool and just like was dropping knowledge to everybody in his, you know, because he read the paper every day and he read books and he knew about stuff. And so I never had a perception of Detroit as being an inferior place ever. I never thought that way. Growing up in Holland Park, living in Detroit, I never, and so I look at what you said now, where we don't have that diversity, not just of um. I mean, I think the things that worry me more about Detroit, certainly the poverty and the lack of, you know, where we see the homeowner rates um have declined over several years. I know they say they bumped up a little, but you know, you know, not just those trends that um great organizations like um Detroit Future City are tracking and doing a beautiful job of doing, but the culture of this town has changed a little bit. Um I feel like the heritage of activism, the history of activism has been neutered a bit um in a way. I mean, I think it's still the princess, don't get me wrong, we have great, but I I think um having grown up in a city where with an unapologetically black mayor, um, uh leadership, and and I'm not, and it's not even just about color. It's not just about color, it's about perspective. It's about being the birthplace of the shrine of black Madonna, the birthplace, birthplace of the nation of Islam, the um place where Dr. King gave the I Have a Dream speech first. The place. There's so there's so much Malcolm X uh Malcolm X ballad or the bullet. Yeah, I mean, and and I and I want to I don't want to be like that old lady who's like, oh, back in my day. I don't want to be that person. But I I think that it there's a shift, and I don't know if it's the result of having um felt disenfranchised by things like emergency management. I mean, there are a lot of things that happened that I think have contributed to it. I think it still persists among some of us, but it's I don't feel that same Detroit.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:04

In terms of what age has shifted to, though, is there language behind that?

Donna Givens Davidson 1:31:07

I think that there's really a lot of promising things like Juwan Howard and the Howard Family Bookstore, right? Juwan just brought a block, like Pages Bookstore. What is the guy's name? Pages, he's a younger. That's a young pig, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:31:21

One of the owners goes to school with my my 12th grader.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:25

I'm interested though, has it shifted to something that you're able to describe? Like, is there a word for what it is that it's shifting to? Is it a more capitalistic entrepreneurial? Is it more conservative than one that would have been?

Donna Givens Davidson 1:31:37

What happened is there's a shift in population. A lot of the people who were the most active and politically elite now live in the suburbs. They've moved out. And so you've lost a prior power base that you used to have, and you have a group of people, many of whom have never had access to power. But let me lift them up, right? Because we do have a mayor who's black, it is black. Oh my goodness. When I was at the state of the city and we're listening to gospel music, I was like, I know this is wrong, right? This feels right to me. I mean, it just there was it was there was this unapologetic mindset in that room, and I have not felt it since Coleman Young. I'll be honest with you. Yeah, but that's what I'm saying. So I'm happy that you're a young woman, and she's surrounding herself with a lot of them people. Juan Howard, Dr. Chanel Hampton are in her administration. Yeah. And these are people who've been in the trenches. And so I think two things happen. When with you stayed in Detroit, and you stayed whatever, and you know, you you you stayed who you are, but you know, there's a whole lot of people who are our friends and sometimes relatives, who got a mindset of I no longer have to care about being black because I have arrived in the body. And my children have arrived. And this with this assimilationist mindset. A lot of assimilators woke up and was like, oh my goodness, racism exists. I'm black again. And so I'm also seeing a return to a lot of the activism because, you know, I've always been too black for most of our friends. Okay. I have been. I'm just too extreme. And I'm like, oh my God, not Donna. Um and and now they like me, kind of, you know. But I maybe they don't want to hang out with me, but they at least want to listen to what I have to say. You know that there was a time when they would just, oh God, there she goes again, Angela Davis. And it was minimizing these conversations because people wanted to believe, and why wouldn't they? Yeah that they were living in a world that had become fair, that everything our parents and grandparents had fought for had succeeded. Now we have a black man in the White House, and we've been able to get places, and it's easy sometimes to turn your back on the people.

SPEAKER_04 1:33:44

Especially when you've been taught that your conditions are a result of things that you've done, not that there has been a conscious effort to lock you out of the American dream. So if you believe it's our fault, then yeah, I mean it is depressing and beautiful.

Donna Givens Davidson 1:33:59

Or, you know, if if you believe that I am responsible for my success, I'm self-made and I did the right things. And if you just do what I did, you could be where I am, um, which is the lie we tell people. If you believe that castech makes you smarter than Cody, and that makes you smarter, you talked about your grandfather having a high school education and being the smartest man. If you believe the narratives around white supremacy and white, and then black people following in the shadows of white supremacy, and we're almost there.

SPEAKER_04 1:34:33

Right. But that's why, you know, when I talk about my origin story about having grown up in Highland Park around the garbage man who loved jazz and exposes me to jazz and the factory workers who there was wisdom everywhere. And so I think um having grown up with this brilliant grandfather who didn't go past high school, I recognize, I mean, I first of all, I could never be a snob, no matter how successful. I just don't, I'm not wired that way. And I think that I'm the only thing I'm snobby about is snobs. Like I can't say it's snobs. I mean, they make my skin crawl. So um I think that um when I say that Detroit has changed, I don't think we have more snobby people here. I think the snobby people have decamped.

SPEAKER_05 1:35:19

Right.

SPEAKER_04 1:35:19

Like you said. And the people who have have left, I think so many of them are just there's I remember there was this book called The Habit of Surviving. It's so difficult to just live your life day to day. Maybe you don't have the bandwidth to also be out there. But I think that you're right.

Donna Givens Davidson 1:35:37

There are there's also the delusion, okay? We have a lot of people sending their kids to suburban schools and saying we've made it. And their kids are facing racism inside of schools, and they come home and they tell their their mom, that's racist. Don't say it's racism, it's you, you need to work and we need to overcome it. And so there's a lot of collective denial that has been going on that I understand and empathize with, but I think denial is actually coming to an end because more and more people are afraid of what's happening and people are waking back up. And now is the time for us to come together around some positive messaging to be forgiving of people who didn't want to believe they had to still deal with racism because who wants to?

SPEAKER_00 1:36:17

Right. Right. And hopefully this show can be a vehicle to do that.

Donna Givens Davidson 1:36:21

Well, that's one of the things we try to do, right? We do.

SPEAKER_00 1:36:24

Uh we want to take a little break, and we're gonna come back and we're gonna do shout-outs to close it out.

Donna Givens Davidson 1:36:34

Calling our residents and lovers of the East Side, the Spring Staldenmeyer Showcase on April 16th is your invitation to come in, get connected, and discover all that the Staldenmeyer Wellness Hub offers for Eastsiders. Experience the space, meet staff and instructors, and learn more about programs designed to support everyday life. Whether you're looking for health and wellness resources, opportunities for your children or family, or ways to stay connected and engaged in the community, join us on April 16th and see why the Staltenmeyer is the place to be.

SPEAKER_00 1:37:03

Applications have opened for the Eastside Community Network Summer Discovery Program. Designed for students entering seventh, eighth, and ninth grade in the fall of 26. This summer experience is a full-day in-person program that combines structured academic learning, hands-on enrichment experiences, and creativity to guide youth in developing life skills related to political and civic engagement, climate change, and environmental justice using art-based expression as a tool for learning and empowerment. The program runs from June 29th to July 31st from 8 30 a.m. to 5 o'clock p.m. Applications close on April 30th. For more details on how to apply, visit ecn-detroit.org slash youth. Welcome back, everyone. You are listening to Authentically Detroit. We are here with Kim Trent, the Deputy Director for Prosperity for the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity. Kim, thank you for joining us on this terrific conversation. Uh it does come through that you guys have known each other for years.

SPEAKER_03 1:38:06

This is our everyday life over the telephone, over the video.

SPEAKER_00 1:38:11

You're truly hearing the behind the scenes. This is the raw and the real conversation. That is why this show is called Authentically Detroit. We want to thank you all for listening in. If you have topics that you want discussed on Authentically Detroit, you can hit us up on our socials at Authentically Detroit on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, or visit our website at authentically-detroit.com. All right. Now, every week we do a shout-out.

SPEAKER_02 1:38:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:38:35

Period portion of the show. Donna, as tradition, let's start with you. Who do you want to shout out and lift up and sing the praises of shout out, Madam Mayor Mary Sheffield.

Donna Givens Davidson 1:38:48

You made me proud. You did us proud last week. Um I just could not believe, not just my response, but everybody's response. People who I thought had sold out, um, came back and they said things. Um it was just beautiful to have somebody as mayor saying things like, every neighborhood deserves investment. She actually said housing is a human right. The mayor of Detroit said housing is a human right. You don't change things by saying them, but you don't change things if you're not willing to say them. You cast a vision, and that vision becomes the North Star that you're moving towards. And I felt really, really connected to that work, and I'm just so proud of her, a young black woman in Detroit who um has earned her space and earned her place as the leader of our community, also because she is young. And I know she's not young to you, Sam, but she's certainly young to me. Um, you know, she's younger than any mayor other than um Kwame Kilpatrick in my lifetime. And unfortunately, he was not equipped for the job, but she is, I think.

SPEAKER_04 1:40:03

She is. I agree. I agree. I'm incredibly proud of her and proud of just, I mean, she just came out the gate so strong, you know. Um, she set a tone, she's not being an incrementalist, she's bold in a way that I think um we just haven't we haven't seen that in a while, that kind of boldness. And to be a black woman, and listen, just look at the list of black women mayors that we've had in this in this country and the their the length of their tenure. I mean, they are facing serious back, you know. Um they face the kind of scrutiny that I don't think other leaders face. And she's unafraid. And I think there's something to be said for that in this context, because she's gotta know, not I mean, we we live in a country that's pretty sexist. As the 2016 and 2024 um elections, I think, really taught us um in a way that I I couldn't predict. And the the fact that she's come out with this bold agenda with saying, I care about Detroit's children, they're my priority. Um I'm gonna have people who are intentional about solving poverty. I'm gonna we're not gonna just say we can't handle housing. Housing is a huge, difficult issue. To even say you're gonna work on it takes a lot of guts. So I I agree with you. She definitely deserves a uh a tip of the hat.

unknown 1:41:33

All right.

SPEAKER_00 1:41:33

I want to shout out journalist Asted Herndon. He just launched his new America actually video podcast show. Uh Asted is a uh from the Chicago area. Uh I got to know him a little bit when I was at Axios through the NABJ conference in Chicago. That was downtown that year. Oof, a lot of fun. Uh that that was the same year that Trump spoke. Uh that was 24. So it was during the the campaign there. But I had met Asted when he was at the New York Times. Uh he is now at Vox. You can check out his new show, America actually, on YouTube and across uh social platforms audio as well. Shout out to you, Asted Herndon. Kim, you want to give us a shout-out?

SPEAKER_04 1:42:20

I I'm just I think I'm echoing um Donna's shout-out for our um our mayor and just the her um, you know, again, I just think the fact that she has not um tiptoed into office, she like jumped in, um made bold um policy decisions, put really talented people um in really important spaces. Um, I, you know, I I am very impressed so far with our leadership.

SPEAKER_00 1:42:51

We want to thank all of you for listening in and supporting our efforts to build an authentic platform of authentic voices for real people here in the city of Detroit. Please like, rate, and subscribe to our podcast on all platforms. We will hear from you guys next week. You can see from me and Donna here at ECN. Come on by, stop by.

Donna Givens Davidson 1:43:13

Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 1:43:14

Thanks for listening.