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To date, Detroit4Detroit has seen 124 people actively fundraise for a project of their choice — raising a total of<br />
$78,000 for non-profit partners. At time of writing (November 2013), the project faces a somewhat uncertain<br />
future as the Citizen Effect platform has shut down. The general approach is clearly something that could survive<br />
the demise of a single platform and Michigan Corps is still evaluating whether there will be new and improved<br />
Phase II. Box 3.7 outlines how the program has worked to-date.<br />
Box 3.7: How Detroit4Detroit Works<br />
Identifying projects:<br />
Adoption of projects:<br />
Promotion of projects:<br />
Support/organization:<br />
22 local people (“partners”) from the Detroit non-profit community work with<br />
Citizen Effect, a Washington, DC-based international non-profit. Local<br />
partners and Citizen Effect curate a list<br />
of viable projects, with each<br />
of the partners submitting five to ten for consideration. People are only<br />
entered into the system if they have a clear plan for success.<br />
Once a project has been vetted, it gets posted to the Detroit4Detroit website for<br />
a Citizen Philanthropist, or CP, to adopt. The CPs are a racially diverse bunch,<br />
albeit mostly with paying jobs and between their late twenties and late thirties.<br />
CPs include over a dozen Detroit ex-pats. 75<br />
After a project has been claimed, Citizen Effect gives the CPs support that<br />
enables them to promote the project on sites like Facebook and Twitter, reach<br />
out to potential supporters through fundraising emails, and have an online<br />
platform to post blogs, videos, and photos. Not everything is done online; there<br />
have also been fundraising events that have ranged from the traditional through<br />
to drag queen bingo and make-your-own-sushi nights. CPs often ask each other<br />
for help.<br />
Michigan Corps serves as the on-the-ground organizer and attempts to increase<br />
the chances of this occurring by holding monthly networking and training<br />
events for citizen philanthropists and their networks, the first of which was in<br />
July 2012. Funding for the program has come from the national James S. and<br />
John L. Knight Foundation.<br />
75<br />
A group of Detroit residents living in New York founded Detroit Nation in 2010. The network now has more than 500 members in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles,<br />
Washington, DC, and Seattle. There is a website http://www.detroitnation.org that is hosted on http://nationbuilder.com so other places can do this.<br />
109 | The New Barn-Raising