Feature Writing

If you visit Cadillac Urban Gardens, you can learn a lot about the southwest Detroit community that surrounds it.

If your visit is during warm weather, you’ll probably first see the lush, green plants growing tomatoes, strawberries, peppers and other fruits and vegetables. 

You might be surprised to see that underneath all this greenery are clean, industrial-looking containers that hold the soil and plants. Or, that the garden containers sit on an old asphalt parking lot.

Looking around, you may also see that the garden is nestled in an area that has both homes and a busy manufacturing plant side-by-side, a hundred-year old neighborhood of modest houses from a time when workers walked to their jobs. 

If you stop to talk to some of the people who were a part of the garden’s earliest days, however, they would share an insight. The most significant thing about the garden doesn’t have anything to do with the site or the things growing there. The most important thing about the garden has been its impact on the gardeners and the community.  (Photo: Cadillac Urban Gardens:)

In 2010, Veronika Scott was a college student with an idea. 

One of her class assignments was to design a product to fill a social need. Her idea? Use recycled materials to make a coat that could turn into a sleeping bag for use by homeless individuals.

Today, the Empowerment Plan, a Detroit-based non-profit she founded, has distributed more than 35,000 sleeping bag coats worldwide. Even more importantly, it provides employment and education to homeless parents who manufacture the coats. By 2019, 75 jobs were created. (Photo: The Empowerment Plan)

Imagine if your favorite bar rolled into your cousin's wedding reception. 

That's a bit of what it feels like to walk up to a bar provided by a mobile bartending service. Often pouring craft beers and signature cocktails from retro-inspired or vintage trailers, these services are becoming a more frequent sight in Southeast Michigan. 

Instead of the usual standard mixed drinks, limited wines and mass-market beers, mobile bartending companies aim to use local brands and ingredients whenever possible. Their signature cocktails rival those of the fanciest brick-and-mortar establishments. (Photo: EdibleWOW)