Informs Our Understanding

Detroit group awards grant

Creative space effort gets initial $2,500

By John Gallagher FREE PRESS BUSINESS WRITER

   The Detroit Foundation, a new nonprofit organization aiming to restore the creative spirit and passion for the city with fellow Michiganders and native Detroiters living elsewhere, has made its first grant, awarding $2,500 to the Chocolate Cake Design Collective.

   The collaborative is a group of recent College for Creative Studies graduates who plan to use the grant to create a “maker space” in which artists, photographers, graphic designers and other innovators can find room and facilities to create.

   The foundation places a heavy emphasis on nonprofit social entrepreneurship and has a stated goal of making Detroit a more innovation-friendly place to live and work.

   Founded in 2010, the Detroit Foundation now reports about 40 voting members and a mailing list of around 350 interested people, drawing members from among Detroit natives living and working around the country.

   The foundation hopes to recruit members into a pro-Detroit community to support inspiring projects through grants and pro-bono professional services in order to help the city recover from abandonment and decline.

   For more information, visit the website at www   .detroitfoundation.org  .

   “The Chocolate Cake Design Collective perfectly captures the creative visions the Detroit Foundation is eager to fund and collaborate with,” said foundation co-founder Adarsh Pandit, a metro Detroit native now living in Bos-ton. “Their short-term vision to create a working studio and their longer-term goals of creating a platform for arts education in the Detroit community is the type of fresh air thinking that we like to stand behind.”

   Foundation co-founder Ranvir Gujral, a Detroit-area native now living in Chicago, echoed that. “Our review of the many proposals received in the Fuel Detroit mini-grant has exposed us to (a) slew of passionate and creative ideas that have flooded into the city,” he said.

   The first grant recipients are using a former manufacturing space at 17501 Van Dyke to create a cooperative space in which artists can get access to a darkroom, kiln, printing press, wood shop and an electronics shop.