We arrived in Detroit at 11 p.m. on the night of March 7 after an 18-hour drive with a few road bumps. There were 11 of us, mostly strangers at the beginning of the trip.
Detroit is home to over 40,000 abandoned buildings, according to the Daily Mail. Many houses have been burned to collect insurance money. Others were demolished, leaving lots of open space and empty plots of land. Giant buildings, once home to the flourishing automotive industry, now stand hauntingly over the city, abandoned and broken.
Despite this, the people of Detroit are not abandoned and broken. They are brave and brilliant, warm and welcoming. The people of Detroit make it the great city that I found it to be.
In Detroit, we volunteered with two organizations, the Ruth Ellis Center and Alternatives for Girls. Although both organizations were amazing, I’m going to focus on my experience with the Ruth Ellis Center, a resource center and safe space for homeless LGBTQ+ youth.
As many as 40 percent of homeless youth identify as LGBTQ, according to ThinkProgress. These people are continually thrown out of their homes or suffer through environments so hostile that they choose to leave, a sad reality that could be prevented if the attitudes toward LGBTQ people were more positive and LGBTQ youth were provided the services and resources they need. The Ruth Ellis Center works to do just that.
Although most of the community service we did at the Ruth Ellis Center was indirect, it was especially important. We painted the walls, cleaned the bathrooms and kitchen, organized the space and built shelving structures. We brightened up the space and did manual labor that the amazing staff simply didn’t have time to do.
As a result, the staff had fewer things to worry about and could focus more completely on devoting their time to helping the youth that they are trained to serve.
But more than that, it helped let the youth know that they matter and that the LGBTQ youth who frequent the center are valuable and deserving of a nice, clean space. It lets them know that people care about them, even if it’s just some random college kids from a thousand miles away. And while we may not mean much to them, we helped add to their space and their home just a little, which will hopefully let the youth live a little healthier and happier.
I had the opportunity to lead a skills-building workshop on emergency preparation. I, along with two other volunteers from our group, taught about eight of the youth on the Ruth Ellis Youth Advisory Board. The youth ranged from ages 14 to 23, but they were all wise beyond their years.
I have never met a more engaged, welcoming and brilliant group of kids. They let us into their space and were active participants in the workshop we taught and discussions we had. We were their peers, and they were genuinely interested in learning about our lives too, even though we were strangers who would disappear within the week.
They were all so positive, and we could tell just how comfortable they were in the Ruth Ellis Center, which for many of them became a place to call home.
The Ruth Ellis Center is focused on principles of harm reduction, the practice of understanding where people’s behaviors come from and working to make unhealthy behaviors less harmful.
This is an important public health principle that has caused some controversy in the past. One example of harm reduction is bleach kits, which the Ruth Ellis Center gives away, or needle exchanges. These provide clean needles to people who inject drugs, preventing the spread of diseases such as hepatitis and HIV.
The Ruth Ellis Center also allows youth to bring in whatever they want, including weapons, as long as they check their bags at the front desk. Sometimes, especially if these youth are living on the street, they might need a weapon to feel safe. Just because that’s what they need to survive doesn’t mean they should be denied access to other resources. Instead of making the space safe by restricting weapons or bringing in a security guard, the Ruth Ellis Center meets youth where they are and acknowledges that safety means something different for everyone.
Something I learned during the center’s orientation is how academic and priviledged the term and identity “queer” is. At the Ruth Ellis Center, the “Q” in LGBTQ stands for questioning. Queer just isn’t in the vocabulary of people who aren’t part of academia. To be fair, it wasn’t in my vocabulary before I got to college either.
My week spent in Detroit was one of the best weeks I’ve ever had. Detroit was an incredibly welcoming community that has a heart of gold. I formed amazing bonds with the group of 11 strangers I left with, and I was able to learn so much from the communities we served. I hope one day I get the chance to return to Detroit and continue to learn from the extraordinary community that lives there.
