"My Ideal Community" Campaign

Submitted by Sarah Duffy

A week ago I sent out an email to the MSSC about a campaign that the Environment Committee of the UofM College Democrats is starting. I have received quite a few responses asking for more information, so I thought it'd be better to just post on our blog so that all who are interested can take a look and respond if they wish.

The idea came from our interest in transportation and land use issues, especially in southeast Michigan. After speaking with Conan Smith from the Suburbs Alliance, we decided to take advantage of our age and status as part of the demographic that Michigan is most in need of to influence how Michigan will develop.

Everyone is aware that we have one of the worst in-state college graduate retention rates in the country and that Detroit is hardly a magnet for young professionals. We believe that this is strongly linked with many of Michigan's environmental problems, and we want to
show Michigan policymakers that we take those issues seriously when deciding where to move after college.

We also wanted to do something creative. A video is more personal and is just a fun, fresh way to do this. It is consistent with the future-oriented perspective of the campaign, using a modern method to portray our vision for our future.

This isn't supposed to be just what we want to see from Michigan, but from whatever community we choose to live in. We also want to make sure that the focus is on aspects that affect quality of life so that there is a personal and economic motivation for sustainable
practices and policies, not just ecological. The interviews will focus on what young people want from their future residence and what makes a place or community attractive for them, covering everything from clean air to transportation, walkable business/nightlife areas and available
outdoor recreation. Hopefully this will send the correct message that sustainability can lead to economic growth.

Ideally, we would like to start filming pretty soon. We've worked out a few base questions for the first set of interviews which will probably change depending on the reactions we get. We've also created postcards that simply read "My ideal community:" and let people draw/color/write on them with markers. If we collect enough of them, we were thinking of
making them into a collage or something to show at the event associated with the video.

We want to show the video at an event probably much later this year and invite panelists from non-profits and some local and state-level officials (we have some good connections through College Dems). If other people around the state are seriously interested, I think it'd be great to get everyone at this event and show all the videos, with each school/group having taken a slightly different interpretation of the main idea.

If people are really interested, please post back and start talking to other people at your school about it. If it's really needed, we could try to organize a conference call at some point too.