About New Detroit
New Detroit is a coalition of leaders from civil rights & advocacy organizations, human services, health & community organizations, business, labor, foundations, education, media, and the clergy. It is a private, non-profit, tax-exempt organization.
New Detroit was formed in response to civil unrest in 1967 that uncovered a host of entrenched social and community ills. At the request of then Michigan Governor George Romney and Detroit Mayor Jerome Cavanagh, business executive Joseph L. Hudson, Jr. convened a unique coalition—the nation's first—to identify and address these problems in a bold and comprehensive way.
Since then, New Detroit, Inc. has been a unique and valuable arena where leaders of Detroit's business, civic, grassroots, and religious communities have come together to plan cooperative strategies and to demonstrate their commitment to the city and its environs. The coalition has worked to impact the actions of individuals and institutions by serving in a number of roles; advocate, catalyst, convener, facilitator, liaison and resource.
New Detroit has served as a catalyst for change, influencing the actions of individuals and institutions. Through advocacy and leadership by example, New Detroit has demonstrated new ways for solving specific community problems, as well as provided resources to community-based groups.
New Detroit's Vision
"Every Community Has A Conscience"
It is an unspoken sense of right and wrong that people share: a fair agreement about how people ought to be treated. A community’s conscience knows that people are fragile, especially children. Our community’s conscience knows that children ought to have schools where they can achieve their best and learn how to succeed in life: where hard work in school translates into a productive future after graduation. Our community’s conscience knows that every one should be able to earn a decent living. Getting hired should have nothing to do with race or color. Earnings should have nothing to do with race or color. But somehow or another, our community has become disconnected from its conscience. Otherwise, we could not tolerate such a gap between the way things ought to be and the way they really are.
The Focus
The Coalition focuses on areas that represent the greatest potential threat to the community's ability to achieve and maintain positive race relations. Four areas demand our attention:
- Youth Development
- Race Relation and Cultural Collaboration
- Economic Equity
- Community Capacity Building
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