U-M Road Scholars: Hands across the mitten

Updated 1:00 PM May 19, 2003

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U-M Road Scholars: Hands across the mitten

By Joseph J. Serwach
News Service

A team of the University's best and brightest fanned out across Michigan in late April, part of an annual effort to increase the number of outreach projects the University conducts while teaching participants more about the state U-M serves.

The Michigan Road Scholars tour brings a cross section of faculty to key areas throughout the state through a bus tour of 13 communities over a five-day period.

This year, participants made stops in Detroit, Flint, Port Huron, Lansing, Battle Creek, Grand Rapids, Muskegon, Traverse City, Empire, Glen Arbor, Suttons Bay, Sault Ste. Marie and then back to Ann Arbor.

Members of the Michigan Road Scholars try out century-old "health" equipment as they learn about the history of the Seventh Day Adventists, the Battle Creek Sanitarium and the importance of health and fitness in the late 1800s. The sanitarium was created by John Harvey Kellogg, who believed good health could be maintained and that illness could be cured through "biologic living," a concept heralded far and wide as the Battle Creek Idea. Shown here are Road Scholars Vahid Lotfi, associate provost and dean of graduate programs and research, U-M-Flint; Susan Najita, professor of English and American Culture, LSA; and Barbra Morris, lecturer in the Residential College, in the background. (Photo courtesy State Outreach Staff)

One stop was at Focus: HOPE, an educational/nonprofit community outreach and training program that was built literally on the ashes of where the 1967 Detroit riots began. It now is widely hailed by both major political parties as a national leader for such programs.

"I'm 45 years old, working two jobs and going to school, so this isn't any kind of kumbaya thing," Focus: HOPE student Darryl McBride told the scholars during a tour of the organization's complex in Detroit.

Focus: HOPE co-founder Eleanor Josaitis told the scholars, who walked through the site in distinctive maize polo shirts, how the Focus: HOPE plants even helped with the U.S. war efforts in Iraq by designing and building a new part for a military vehicle in record time, part of the organization's emphasis on "flexible capabilities."

"We're now copied in 32 states," she said.

The University provides assistance to Focus: HOPE in many ways–everything from student volunteers to faculty assistance and advisers–while the program, in turn, helps University experts with research and other outreach efforts.

One goal of the Road Scholars program is to build on such partnerships, which help all participants grow by bringing state communities and the University closer together. Getting faculty into Michigan's communities not only increases outreach between the University and Michigan and state communities, it also teaches faculty more about the communities from which most of their students come.

Keith Cooley, a former General Motors executive and a graduate of the U-M School of Engineering who is now COO of Focus: HOPE, promised the U-M scholars, "This experience will change your life."

It often inspires the creative thinkers who participate to embark on more projecs to aid the communities they visited.

The tour took participants through nearly every part of the state and touched on most of the major issues facing the state. Participants went to the international border city of Port Huron to discuss and learn about tourism and trade, and to Detroit and Highland Park neighborhoods to learn about rebuilding. They learned about legislative issues at the state capital as well as environmental issues at western Michigan's Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore.

Lew Morrissey, U-M director of state outreach, said the program benefits the participants as well as the areas of the state they visit.

The Road Scholars trip, begun in 1999, happens each spring shortly after the end of the semester. It often inspires the creative thinkers who participate to embark on more projects to aid the communities they visited.

For example, several veterans of past Road Scholars tours later returned to Detroit to participate in a Habitat for Humanity Workathon while Reynolds Farley, a veteran of the 2000 Road Scholar Trip, developed a class called "Metropolitan Detroit: Social, Economic and Racial Trends."

Faculty interested in participating in next year's trip can learn more about the program at http://www.umich.edu/~govrel/mrs/overview.html.

U-M Road Scholars: Hands across the mitten

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