Focus: HOPE
Eleanor Josaitis
1355 Oakman Blvd.
Detroit, Mich. 48238
(313) 494-5500
Website: www.focushope.edu
E-mail: webmaster@focushope.edu

Photos courtesy of Focus: Hope

This "teaching factory," a national model for preparing youngsters for high-tech, high-pay employment, goes straight to the jobless young people in the city's heavily poor and predominantly black neighborhoods and turns them into highly qualified high-tech workers for the coming century.

Father Bill Cunningham started a neighborhood group devoted to rebuilding human relations in the wake of Detroit's 1967 riots, then moved quickly to develop a commodities-distribution program intended to build the health and strength of the community's poor mothers and their babies. Its "food prescription program," passing out government-surplus food in a setting very much like a supermarket, has become one of the largest of its kind in the nation, serving more than 80,000 people every month at its peak in 1992. (A decrease to 71,000 in 1994 is a hopeful sign that the economy is improving, its operators say.)

But it was the crash of Detroit's auto-related industries, and specifically the closing of three large factories on the same block with Focus: HOPE's office, that inspired its most spectacular activities. Pulling together community support and creative financing, the organization bought the empty factory buildings and moved in, revitalizing them with real, working factories that provide Detroit's people with advanced work training, good jobs and, as the name implies, hope. The project has grown to fill a three-block "Industry Mall" containing four profit-making factories. One plant hires single mothers to rebuild General Motors auto transmissions. Another turned what was once a dead-end "work for welfare" program into a thriving business that makes diesel engine hoses and emission-control harnesses for automakers.

Focus: HOPE's education program aims to do no less than convert Detroit's young people into a high-skill workforce, the 1990s equivalent of the great labor force that once made the Motor City the world's leader in the automobile industry but has now all but vanished. In Focus: HOPE's 12-year-old Machinist Training Institute -- the modern equivalent of the old labor apprenticeship programs -- former auto-industry machinists share their craft with local young people. By 1994, this program had placed more than 1,000 graduates in precision machining and metal-working jobs at 125 Detroit plants. Many are thriving; at least one graduate is now earning $70,000 a year as a programmer for a Big Three auto company.

Project Fast Track, acknowledging the unpleasant reality that many youngsters graduate from Detroit's high schools without a functional command of reading, writing or mathematics, puts them back on track with a quick but intense computer-based remedial program that gets them up to speed to move into the Machinist Training Institute.

Finally, Focus: HOPE's new Center for Advanced Technologies used a unique combined $20 million grant from the federal Departments of Defense, Commerce, Education and Labor to build a showplace training site that opened in 1994. Originally the old Massey-Ferguson plant, later a Ford plant, left abandoned after 1984, it has undergone a total rehab, inside and out, to emerge as a high-tech facility of bright green, glass and stainless steel, with a vast open shop floor equipped with the latest in computerized flexible-technology equipment. It looks like nothing so much as the Starship Enterprise from Star Trek. Graduates of the Machinist Training Institute will go on to a four-year course here, emerging as skilled technician-engineers competent to operate, maintain, repair and modify the most modern automated manufacturing systems. No other institution in the entire country is now training workers at this level of expertise in the robotic manufacturing machinery that will be needed to revitalize U.S. industry in the competitive world economy of coming decades.

All the feature stories on @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG's pages are reported and written by Robin Garr, a prize-winning journalist who has visited more than 500 innovative grassroots programs in all 50 states since 1990.

Browse his book, Reinvesting In America, at Amazon.com.

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