Giving Compass' Take:

• Detroiters Helping Each Other (DHEO) is a community-based organization that works together to support each other to supplement for lack of city services. 

• How can public or private sector aid help strengthen the work of DHEO? 

• Read about the successful work of the teachers in Detroit and the innovative projects students are working on. 

A multitude of voicemails and text messages from desperate neighbors flooded Jessica Ramirez’s cell phone on a brisk morning in October 2013.

Winter was coming. Using social media to reach potential donors as well as those seeking help, Ramirez created a makeshift donation center on the sidewalk outside her Southwest Detroit home. There, the community organizer and her neighbors handed out warm clothing to children and recycled beds, dressers and microwaves to new mothers who needed furniture.

Recognizing her efforts, the property manager of an abandoned local storefront gave her use of the facility. That’s when her charitable acts became a community shop—Detroiters Helping Each Other (DHEO)—where kindness and generosity, not money, is the currency of exchange.

“I would love to see us not need this anymore,” she says.

Decades of economic and population decline, a depleted tax base, and critically underfunded city services have forced Southwest Detroiters to self-organize, establishing a local network of goods and services to fill in for missing city services. The result is a range of neighbor-to-neighbor efforts, like DHEO, that seek to address broader needs that are going unmet by local government agencies.

Three years ago, the city of Detroit named DHEO “Organization of the Year” for its role helping families recover from a fire that burned seven homes to the ground, just blocks from Ramirez’s home. But Ramirez says a family’s inability to produce any of those things won’t be a hindrance to receiving help. And ultimately, the organization relies on trust between neighbors in the community and the social networks that underlie it.

City and state government services are rebounding but the hope is they won’t threaten what neighbors have already built to save their communities.

Read the full article about Detroit building community by Kevon Paynter at YES! Magazine