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John George questions answered

Page history last edited by Ashley Nivison 8 years, 11 months ago

 

Can you tell us how you got started?

I happen to be a life long resident of the city and I moved into the northwest section 30 years ago. There was an abandoned home behind us that turned into a crack house and I didn’t want to move but I didn’t want my son and my daughter growing up in and around that kind of negative energy. An abandoned home attracts a lot of folks that are doing things that just aren’t good. Parking on the lawn, doing drugs, throwing bottles in the street, arson, etc.

I personally believe it’s a form of child abuse to allow children to grow up in that environment. Again I didn’t want to move and I didn’t want them to be subjected to that. One time it got really out of hand with gunfire and breaking glass, complete madness. So the next morning I was going to pack up and leave and I thought to myself, I pay my gas, I take out my trash, I pay my mortgage, I keep my house neat, why should I move? So instead I went to the hardware store and bought plywood, nails, and paint, and raced back to the neighborhood and set up shop on the front lawn and I started boarding up the crack house. I was out there about 4 hours by myself boarding up the house and cutting the grass. Racking up, cleaning up, sweeping up and a couple neighbors joined me, we worked about 8 hours that day and when the drug dealers showed up that night they pulled up in a white jeep and walked up to the house and started looking at the house, then looked at each other, then looked at the jeep, and then they got in the jeep and they left. We looked at each other and said wow that was kind of easy. So that’s how it started. The two fellas that helped me start the organization were the two fellas that joined me that day and they both happened to be young fathers with young children. So they were just as concerned as I was. So the 3 of us back in 1988 founded the motor city blight busters so this June, we’ve been at it 27 years. It’s safe to say that I, and others are still at the effort. Our goal is really to continue to clean up the community, create safe and beautiful neighborhoods, affordable housing. We’ve built coffee shops, art galleries, jazz clubs, community centers, affordable housing. We’re going to continue to bring volunteers together with our corporate partners and our staff and continue to stabilize and revitalize Detroit.

 

How have you managed to keep going for 27 years?

Well it helps if you’re a stubborn SOB. Also you have to have a love for your city and for your community. Again this was started in an effort to protect my children. You know mothers and fathers, that’s their natural instinct; you know to protect their flock. So it was really out of love and concern for not only my children but for seniors, my wife, and my neighbors. Like I mentioned I’ve lived in the city all my life and the easy thing would have been to just move but that’s not in my DNA I guess I would prefer to stay and fight and 27 years later it looks like everybody is fighting to rebuild the city. A lot of folks call me the God Father of blight removal because I’ve been at it for so long. Sometimes I feel like the queen of England. If you remember photos of the queen, with president Kennedy and the queen, president Johnson and the queen, president Nixon and the queen. Well I’ve been through about 7 mayors so I feel like the queen of England sometimes. In all seriousness though it really has been a labor of love and like I said we’ve been at it 27 years and we’ve been blessed to have corporate partners.

 

That’s what you mentioned before..

 

We have over 10,000 volunteers that volunteer regularly. We meet every Saturday, 52 Saturdays out of year, at the little coffee shop that we built. We go out into the neighborhood and it’s simple, we tear something down and fix something up. The last thing I want to say about that is that during the spring, summer, and fall volunteers come from all over the community, from the state, and the nation. We’ve actually had volunteers coming in from around the world. We’re able to put people out in the street 6 days a week during summer and fall. Right now is a real busy time. As a matter of fact we have a group in from a church in Lake Orion and they’ve been coming for the last 16 years. We’ve really built a dynamic group, of groups that are all working together for a better Detroit.

 

How do you get these different groups involved? How do you spread the word about blight busters to recruit volunteers and to recruit the churches, especially from the metro area? Is it a first come first serve basis, do people just show up on Saturdays? Do you have information available online, how does that work?

 

Well of course we have our facebook page and our website. I have to say this thing was very organic, we really built it from the ground up and initially when we started this thing it was really just the 3 of us. And one weekend after a long day of blight busting, we ran into a group of elders from the church of Jesus Christ of latter day saints and we struck up a conversation. As they were leaving one of the young men said, “oh yeah and on Saturdays we volunteer with a community group.” And they said. “well what’re you doing next Saturday? We can join you.” So that next Saturday about 20 youth showed up. Not only did we have the 2 neighbors and myself but we had a little bit of a fighting chance because we had more people. From there it just grew, different community groups found out about us and so did the media. We’ve been pretty good about reaching the media to gain support from Ford, GM, Chrysler, home depot, Comerica, starbucks, skillman foundation, Michigan foundation? And Comcast. So it’s like anything, if you do the right thing long enough, ultimately the world will follow. Today we have lots of support, even as far as the white house, the governors office, the mayors office, the city council. They’ve all supported us in some form or fashion. Again because what we’re doing, is what needs to be done. It doesn’t matter if you’re the president of the United States or if Ned the wino on the corner, if you watch long enough and what we’re doing and what we’ve been able to accomplish you know it’s right. People that know what’s right usually do right. Again it has a lot to do with being really stubborn and refusing to quit.

 

That being said, how do you finance these major projects? Is it based on donations or you volunteering your funds? Do you get backing from the city, how does that work?

 

We receive very little support from the city, keeping in mind they just came our of bankruptcy. Like I mentioned we have various partners and corporate sponsors. We’ve worked on over 1,500 properties in the last 27 years and raised and spent over 20 million dollars. Some years of course are better than others. Like I’ve mentioned we’ve built community centers and coffee shops, cafés, and art galleries. Some of those commercial properties create a cash flow because we lease space to businesses. We also renovate and sell houses, which creates a cash flow. We get corporate support and foundation support, so that helps. We have individuals that make donations. We have car and house donation programs where people can donate an old house or an old car. We’ll fix up the house or the car and then sell it. We’ve been very creative, and we’ve created multiple chains of income. We also sell blight busters t-shirts, bumper stickers, and other Blight Busters products and merchandise. We’ve also worked out a deal with Carhart where we’re selling some of their clothing in one of our stores, in one of our blight busters shops. So it’s really a combination of all of that and being creative.

 

Do you have interns or volunteers who are responsible for running that kind of stuff?

 

We have a small full time staff that handles a lot of the administrative; we have a grant writer that writes grants for us, we have crew leaders who we call our senior crew leaders that work with our volunteers. We have some volunteers that help us out with some of the technical stuff like web design, putting together projects and programs, flyers, and those kinds of things. Like I mentioned we’ve been very good to what I call, leverage the media, to spread our message of working together for positive change. What we do with our volunteers we work to create ownership in our housing work, renovating homes and selling them to families, or creating business owners. And then of course, we’ve demolished hundreds of abandoned properties by hand with volunteers and people power. Just north of our coffee shop and gallery, we’ve cleared two city blocks of abandoned housing and put in an urban farm known as farm city Detroit. Everything that we grow there we give away to kids and seniors in the community. Because of our work in the Grand River Lahser area, we were able to help attract a Meijers that is opening up in June. They purchased the abandoned school did all the demolition and clean up work and spent 33 million dollars. In June of this year they’re opening up 190,000-foot store and employing about 400 of our neighbors. So because of our work and others in that community we’ve been able to attract some major companies who are coming in and knocking down old buildings and building new malls. We also work with the city and other groups to maintain our parks in our community. Every 9 days the parks in our community with another group, motor city grounds crew, cut the grass, clean up the park, rake the leaves, trim the bushes, cut down dead trees, whatever we need to do.  We want to have a park where our children can go and just be kids without having to stumble over tires and glass and garbage. We really have made an effort where many are involved.

 

Have you ever considered collaborating with Wayne State to have college age volunteers or intern for college credit or anything like that?

 

Oh absolutely. You might not be aware of this but for many years there was a group called the Wayne State blight busters and I don’t know if they still are functional. But what I do know is that just about every Saturday volunteers join us from Wayne State to help with clean up and restoration work. we would be honored to expand that to include interns and others that can help with some of the administrative stuff and of course clean up the city.

 If you have an opportunity go to youtube and see some of our videos. About 30 videos will pop up and there’s some pretty interesting stuff on there  

 

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