The Eastside Community Network is beautifying its campus

There's rebar poking outside of the cement here. There's tons of water flooded everywhere. What's going on here over at the Eastside Community Network? This used to be our parking lot. This is our former parking lot. This building that we're in used to be a Henry Ford Medical Clinic that was donated to us in 2012. And in 2021-22, we turned the building inside into a wellness hub. But the outside was not well. I just actually just wanted to throw up a berm in the front of the building and a berm in the back of the building. And so they were like, cool. And then they had a sit down and they came and they said, we have a crazy wild design idea for you. How about if we turn this into a mother tree campus and we allow sidewalks like this to function almost like roots into the community. All of our lighting in this space is going to be solar powered. On this side, we're going to have a meditation garden. We're also going to have some more classroom space. We can learn, we can recreate, we can just use this space in flexible ways. I should mention that this site, by removing impervious surfaces and by creating rain gardens and bioswales, we're also going to be helping to protect our water. This is a furnished, beautiful space that we can use to enjoy Mother Nature and Brother Nature. Talk about a pitch for the show and a plug for wellness. While the renderings tell part of the story of the Eastside Community Network's future campus, there's also symbolism built into that vision as well. The pavilion's name, Peace Plaza, is an ode to the loving space and the nonprofit's rejection of violence. As for the garden, they're named in honor of Angela Brown Wilson. Angela was a role model. She was a former supervisor. She was a person who really modeled just complete love for her community. Her last day of work at ECN, she was walking a foundation leader through our site to try to encourage investment. And in fact, we did get the investment, but that was her last day because the next day she was diagnosed with leukemia. And so we lost her last spring, and we dedicated these gardens to her memory, but also to her service in our community, the Angela Brown Wilson Gardens. Mixing green infrastructure with gray infrastructure can sometimes help, and the biggest addition to our beautiful gardens coming in here is the battery. We now have solar on our rooftop, and we produce a lot of electricity through the solar. Any excess electricity on any given day is stored in these batteries, and there's three of them. So that in the event of a brownout or a blackout, the batteries can actually power our building. Our goal has never just been about Eastside Community Network or the Eastside of Detroit. We want to demonstrate other ways to redevelop spaces in our community that we can bring greening into urban areas like Detroit.