Thanks for visiting Detroit143.org. We’re still under construction but we’re glad to give you an early look. You can learn more about what we’re up to here, how we plan to sustain ourselves here, and a bit about our team here. We hope to encounter you in person somewhere across the city’s 143 square miles of land and water. Depending on your generation, this link may be helpful if the meaning of Detroit143 in texting code does not leap immediately to mind.

Most immediately, though, we hope you’ll join us in the storytelling that we believe can help rejuvenate Detroit’s neighborhoods. Tell us what matters to you. What do you see that gives you hope? What’s missing from the landscape and the conversations on your block and beyond? We believe the road to a more vibrant Detroit starts in the hearts, concerns and ideas of people just like you. If you have story ideas about Southwest Detroit that you’ll like us to pursue – or that you’d like to tell – please send them to [email protected].

Here are some specific ways you can join the storytelling:

• True Southwest Photos: We invite you to share your photos to the hashtag #trueSWDetroit on Twitter or Instagram. Thanks to the Fliptu app, your images should appear at the bottom of our homepage within 15 minutes. We’re especially looking for images that reflect some of what you believe to be the heart and soul of Southwest. Photos with that hashtag will automatically appear in the True Southwest area in the middle of the homepage.
• SeeClickFix Southwest: We invite you to serve as the eyes and ears of City Hall as it attempts to address the city’s long-deferred maintenance issues. Just visit seeclickfix.com and register and you’ll be set up to report problems you spot in Southwest. Tires dumped illegally in a vacant lot? Water running in an abandoned building? Junk in the road? If you have a smart phone, download the SeeClickFix app. It’s free. Snap a photo of the issue you want to report and upload it via the smartphone app or from your laptop or desktop. The Water & Sewer Department is the only agency officially tracking SeeClickFix issues so far, but Detroit143 will see your report and we’ll make sure someone at City Hall does, too.

Detroit143 has some other features we hope you’ll find useful as well:

• Southwest Tweets is a curated collection of Twitter feeds that we think will be especially useful for people living in – or interested in – Southwest Detroit. You’ll find it on the right rail of the site, just below Detroit by Numbers. The Tweets come through fast and furiously at times, so we store the most recent couple hundred Tweets.
• Southwest Events lives just beneath Southwest Tweets in the right rail, and tracks, well, events happening in Southwest! Here’s a list of upcoming events:

That’s probably enough for now. We hope you enjoy the site and, even more importantly, join the storytelling!

Kirk Cheyfitz
Nichole Christian
Bill Mitchell
Shirley Stancato

(You’ll find contact info for each of us here.)