Stacey Grant, August 22nd, 2024

Stacey Grant, August 22nd, 2024

In this interview, Stacey Grant shares her experiences with Covid-19 and discusses the climate advocacy happening in Metro Detroit.

Detroit Historical Society

Detroit Historical Society

en-US

Stacey Grant

Originally from South Korea, Stacey Grant grew up in Allen Park, Michigan and has lived in Dearborn for eleven years. She obtained her undergraduate degrees in Political Science and Psychology at University of Michigan, and her master’s degree in International Relations and Human Relations at the University of Oklahoma. She’s the founder of Path40 Consulting, and has worked with organizations including Planet Detroit, where she serves on the board, and the Highland Park Community Crisis Coalition.

Doris Lanzkron-Tamarazo

8/22/2024

49:59

Doris Lanzkron-Tamarazo: I'm Doris Lanzkron-Tamarazo, it's August 22nd, 2024, and I'm here with. Please say your name.

Stacey Grant: Stacey Grant.

DLT: Please spell your name.

SG: S t a c e y G r a n t.

DLT: Thank you. And where do you live?

SG: In Dearborn, Michigan.

DLT: How long have you lived there?

SG: We've been there for 11 years.

DLT: Have you lived elsewhere in Metro Detroit?

SG: I was adopted from South Korea and raised from two on in Allen Park, Michigan. My husband and I were high school sweethearts, and then we moved away for quite a few years and then returned back with our kids.

DLT: And what career are you in?

SG: So I'm a community collaborator and consultant. So supporting nonprofit organizations to advance their own solutions, many of them working in environmental justice and climate justice issue areas.

DLT: And how did you get involved in that work?

SG: So Covid actually kind of was an impetus here. There was— Well, let me back up. With the 2021 election of Joe Biden, he passed an executive order. The Justice40 Initiative was part of that executive order, which was a mandate, really, for all climate-related federal investments, covering certain areas, should flow to what was considered disadvantaged communities. And I knew that that was going to include so many neighborhoods in areas in Metro Detroit. Detroit, specifically, and Highland Park. And I was working as a volunteer with organizations in Highland Park. And so, was supporting those organizations to understand the moment of this kind of unprecedented federal climate investment.

DLT: And going back a little bit, when did you first hear about Covid 19?

SG: So I heard the rumblings of it from the news, in, you know, early January, probably. I had traveled with my husband to New York in very early March, and saw more people in masks and realized that this was going to be coming to the U.S.. I think that the country before the U.S. that was hit really hard was Italy. And I know that there was a lot of communication coming out of Italy trying to warn the world that this was real. And, yeah, I think that the gravity of the situation, when it felt like the world shut down in that mid-March time frame.

DLT: And did you take any steps to prepare once you started to see that this was going to come to the United States?

SG: I did. I mean, we did as much as we could to stock up on things that we thought were going to be necessities. And I think that I was doing, I mean, into the night kind of research. You know, just scouring as much as I could to really understand that this was going to be a global pandemic. We read about pandemics in history books, but it felt like this was not going to be just two weeks or three weeks. And actually, I had emailed my church pastor. And he had sent out an email just saying, you know, we're going to close down for just a couple of weeks, but we'll come back. And I tried to lay out some information just to help him prepare. Because, I think that faith leaders, those in kind of trusted relationships with their community, were really going to be central to information and communication that was going to be necessary for people to stay protected during this really uncertain, very scary, and what I thought even from the beginning was going to be a prolonged time.

DLT: And how did you become involved with Project Frontline Heroes Detroit?

SG: So. I felt a tremendous amount of responsibility and privilege to be able to be home with my family. My husband was usually traveling, working in the office, and was able to work from home. He also served in the military. He and I were high school sweethearts. He had attended West Point, so he was in the military for about ten years, and had deployed during that time, in 2004. 2005. And I was seeing the parallels between the front line, you know, of what we would say are our military heroes, sending them out to protect us, and this moment of the pandemic, where you had front line essential workers. You had front line protectors. That's everybody from janitorial crew, grocery store workers, those, you know, a part of the supply chain, to nurses, and doctors and EMT workers, and firefighters, and that we as a country really needed to respond with the same amount of honor, respect, and responsibility to protect them. But because of the supply shortage, I realized that we actually needed to mobilize in a mutual aid kind of person-powered, people-powered way to fill the gap of the supply chain until business as usual could kind of catch up. And so I had started this group, Protect Our Frontline Heroes Metro Detroit, with the hope and intention that I could take some of my community organizing skills from a lot of different experiences and to organize this supply chain.

DLT: And can you tell me about your work with the Highland Park Community Crisis Coalition?

SG: Yes. So, the coalition In Highland Park is made up of three community organizations led by community members in Highland Park: Soulardarity, Avalon Village and Parker Village. All three had been working together in various ways, centrally, to organize as residents and as community members to try to bring back the street lights. So in 2011, DTE had repossessed over a thousand of the city street lights, many of them residential. And when I—living in Dearborn, a mom of three kids—when I read, really, a news story about the street lights being repossessed and that Soulardarity was leading the charge on conversations on energy democracy, and how they were going to try to teplace these repossessed streetlights with solar street lights that were community-owned and community-organized and community-powered, I reached out to that then-executive-director. Jackson Koeppel. Right now, the executive director is Shimekia Nichols. And I just, I think I felt mobilized and called to act, and so I just offer support as a volunteer. And so, I've done communication work, in various capacities. I worked alongside their team to launch their We Lit Avalon! Campaign to raise $37,500 through our crowdfunding campaign. And through that process, we were able to raise the funds for ten street lghts, five placed at Avalon Village, along Avalon Street in Highland Park, and the other five at Parker Village, on Buena Vista Street. And so built relationships with those, with the people, the leaders of those three organizations. And then when the pandemic hit, those three organizations, because of their relationship, because they had already had ties with the community, and because Avalon Village and Parker Village are place-based organizations, so they have physical buildings that they could operate out of, they started launching their own mutual aid support, distributing food, water, basic necessities. You know, serving as information and communication hubs.

And the Highland Park Community Crisis Coalition, or HPC3, really formed because they realized that they needed to organize themselves to better organize and get information and resources to their community, faster than what systems and even city and county services could get to them. And so in that moment, you see that community can get to community quicker than, you know, sometimes government can. But the question always is, who's helping the helpers? Who's resourcing those that are providing the resources? And so at this kind of nexus in time, when HPC3 was doing so much of the work, hands on the ground, running medical clinics, helping to get information and food, water, and support out to the community, they also needed to find resources for the work that they were doing. And also the Justice40 initiative was launching, where now there was going to be real dollars. And when I say real dollars, I'm talking, you know, there's an estimate of up to 1.2, some even estimate it to be closer to $2 trillion of funding that's going to be flowing through our country related to climate and clean energy investments over the next decade. And how do we ensure that all of these infrastructure dollars, all of these federal and state dollars, are not just going to the same old groups. That they follow the same trajectory of causing environmental harm, pollution, and really remarginalizing, right, communities like Highland Park and Detroit. So I worked with those organizations to kind of explain what Justice40 initiative meant. We applied as a group for a national program called the Justice40 Accelerator to help them navigate the difficulty of the federal funding maze and continue to support those organizations now to help them unlock resources and funding for the work that they do.

DLT: And what do you feel that the impacts of climate change have been on Detroit and Metro Detroit?

SG: So I think that the exacerbation of the harm that already existed has just accelerated with. climate change. And flooding, of course, is top of mind. This affects, you know, all along the riverfront, but in neighborhoods from Jefferson Chalmers all the way to South End Dearborn and East Dearborn, even West Dearborn, and communities all around Metro Detroit. And I think that there is a recognition that these hundred-year-floods are not every hundred years but every few years. That we have a degrading infrastructure that can not handle the type of emergencies that people are seeing. And would love to uplift Planet Detroit, which is an environmental news nonprofit startup started by Nina Ignaczak, long-time journalist, now executive editor and founder of Planet Detroit. Because they're really telling the stories of climate change and how it's affecting public health, or how it's intersecting with all facets of community health and community life. So not only flooding, but, you know, looking at equitable tree canopies, looking at the heat island effects, and where those impacts are most felt. And using data to really be able to unlock and show community the why behind what community already knows and what they're experiencing.

DLT: And living in Dearborn, what impacts of climate change have you seen in your own life over the past decade?

SG: So I think that what I've realized more is the inequity of Investment in infrastructure and how that impacts my own life. So, living in West Dearborn, you look at Southfield Freeway and how it really divides West Dearborn from East Dearborn. Even though we're one community. These aren't two separate cities. But I would say that there are separate realities of how climate change is impacting the West from the East. And that's not to divide us as a community. It's actually an opportunity to come together and share experiences and understand why. And I think that there's a lot of explanations, but related to how power and how funding and resources are distributed or not distributed equitably, that all the data tells the story. And so, if you look at the climate and environmental justice screening tool, which was published by the White House, its, you know, thirty-six indicators of climate vulnerability and environmental justice issues, impact issues—or the EPA edge screening tool—and you look at Dearborn, you will see red in the East and, blue, are less affected, in the West. And so in order to protect ourselves, as a community, from the impacts of climate change, we need to start having community conversations now and have a community-driven planning process to develop a climate action plan and to ensure that those most harmed and most impacted by the effects of climate change are central to the conversation and central to the decision-making processes of where are the resources, where are the funding, and what the solutions are going to be.

DLT: And what do these harms look like on the ground in areas that are red on the map?

SG: So, in kind of the most basic form, if we think about what is it that we need to thrive, what is it that we need to live, we look at our air, we look at our water, look at our land, and our soil. And so, the shared experience of South End Dearborn, Southwest Detroit, you know, the industrial corridor there. It means higher rates of asthma. It means higher rates of health burdens. Higher rates of energy insecurity. Worse air pollution? Worse toxic soil and less development, right? Like, it's hard to economically develop areas that have toxic pollution running through their water streams or running through their air, in their homes. And so I think that— You know, there is a mom who is part of a community group in South End Dearborn who they're organizing, right, to have a voice and a seat at the table. And she told me at an event that was happening in Dearborn that her son goes out in a mask, even before Covid and even after Covid, because he's asthmatic. And on days where there's really poor air quality, he has difficulty breathing, right? And I'm really thankful that a Detroiter who started his Detroit-based company, JustAir, Darren Riley, his company has installed, worked with Dearborn's new public health department to install six air sensors. And his company is really a data platform that allows community residents to have direct access to our own community data. And so when air quality is poor, we'll get indicators on our phone. There's information there that residents can use. And it's really a mobilizing tool, right? It’s an advocacy tool, to be able to go to your city or to be able to go to the county, and say, you know, this is the information that we know, and we've known it all the time, all along. Especially those that are experiencing it. But here's the data, and now it's time to really ignite conversation about how to solve those challenges.

DLT: And we've been talking about climate inequities. Did you, during the Covid pandemic, observe any inequities in how people experienced Covid as well?

SG: So I think that what I can say about the pandemic and inequities is that I saw the resources flowing into communities, into counties, that had more, right? And that we delivered over 25,000 pieces of PPE. This was an all-volunteer, community-led effort. We had over 200 volunteers. People were making masks and hospital gowns and we were picking up PPE from Monroe to Commerce Township. This was really like a whole Metro Detroit, Southeast Michigan operation. All volunteer-led. But we were trying to distribute the masks and PPE to the locations that were most forgotten, had the least resources. And so we were delivering to the hospitals that had the least in their kind of network. Or delivering to smaller nursing homes or hospice care centers, community fire departments and police departments, where, you know, we would be dropping off maybe 30 masks instead of 300. But making sure that those who are most vulnerable and sometimes least remembered were prioritized in terms of how we were distributing the resources.

And I think that those same inequities can describe the impacts of environmental injustices. Whose land is polluted, whose water is polluted, whose air is polluted? Are there equal benefits, and equal harm across the board? And we can say that's not the case. And then with climate change, of course, who has the resources to rebound, to respond, to recover from? Who has the money to be able to clean out their basement again? Or to be able to withstand blackouts and power outages? There's just so many people who cannot pick up and go, can't, you know, take their family and move into a hotel for a week or two or have enough money to replace the food in their fridge or have a generator for their medication. And so there's so many primary, secondary, kind of ripple effects of climate change. And I think the sounding alarm is that there are so many things that are within our control as a community, as people, as neighbors. And there are things that we've done in the past, decisions that have been made that we cannot reverse. Not in time. And so we have to think about resiliency and mitigating. But we also have to think about that idea of climate adaptation. And how are we going to work together and adapt? But we need to make sure that the people who are first to experience the worst, the most vulnerable to harm, have access to, equitable access to resources and information to protect themselves.

DLT: And what do you think are those factors that can be reversed versus those that we will have to adapt to?

SG: So I think that the genie is out of the bottle. The greenhouse gas emissions that are already released, the sea level rise, those things we cannot just reverse, right, by reducing our carbon emissions for the next 25 years. But what we can do is we can try to make this just revolutionary global transformation, right, to literally almost dismantling or retiring the way that we've powered our lives and power our buildings and our cars and our infrastructure, our houses. And we can think about the choices that we're going to be making. And so many of these things will require, you know, individual small decisions, but they also require just those large, system-level changes to our energy grid, to having, really, a new way to power our vehicles and the way that we think about mobility. And so we have to be able to accept the complexity of this, where it is not just a rain barrel. These things are important, nature-based solutions. We have to be able to accept that, we have to think both and not either-or. So it's not, well, I'm only going to think about nature-based solutions but not think about food waste. I'm only going to be thinking about how to electrify my home, but not think about the impacts of continuing to use natural gas.

We have to be able to accept the complexity. But before we do that, we have to also accept our humanness and how we're asking for kind of this massive shift of understanding and human behavior. And so, that's really kind of up to all of us to be able to translate, communicate, initiate conversations about this in ways that don't intimidate or scare people, intimidate or scare ourselves and our families and our friends, but come to that conversation about climate change with both realism and also with hope that there are choices that we can make to make sure that we are still here and that we protect the Earth that gives us everything. And I do believe that— The Earth will continue to exist. Out of the millions or billions of species, I think we have to take this moment to be humble and understand we literally are just one species, you know? But we're such a privileged and blessed species, and we can take those blessings and we can think about how we're going to sustain and protect not only ourselves, but our planet. And it always starts with our local community.

DLT: And what would you like to see your city or neighborhood do as far as green infrastructure projects or anything else that you think would help deal with climate change and climate adaptation?

SG: So what I would really love for my city to do is what I would love for all cities to be able to do. And maybe for— You know, we really always have to remember rural communities, not just in Michigan but all over the country. They have equal voice, too. And sometimes— These are our farmers and our growers and such a huge part of the fabric of our country. And so what every community or every place needs is, we need to be able to come together and have an organized and coordinated, but community-driven, climate action planning process. And it doesn't start with climate change. Those conversations start with a question. Who do you love? What do you want to protect? What are your community strengths? What are the challenges that you're experiencing? What are the things that are causing you harm or hurt? When you close your eyes and you think about your community, in ten years or fifty years or a thousand years, what do you see? And I think that's where—it's a moment or a question—that there's something really shared there, right. So we might not all have this be in agreement around climate change. But we can agree, when we come together with our neighbors and with our community members, that we want a healthy, thriving community. We want healthy people, healthy places, healthy air, healthy water. And then you start to be able to unpack some of those questions, and you go from just a broad big vision to identifying shared priorities. And you have to make sure that you not only have what you would consider kind of traditional stakeholders at that table. So yes, maybe, like, the mayor's administration. Yes, maybe city council members. Yes, commission members. But you need to make sure you have community-based organizations, faith leaders, community residents. You need to have representation and inclusion of all voices in your community in that visioning session, that visioning process.

And from the visioning— I mean, think about it like starting with a big block of clay and you're just refining from there. What are our priorities? What are the investable projects we want to see? And you start to shape the conversation around solutions and not around just problems, or junctions of disagreement on the why. Because that's going to just stall, right, or paralyze conversations around climate change or climate action planning. And really from there, the goal is to then think practical and tactical. How, if these are our priorities, this is what we’re eperiencing as a community related to climate change, how are we going to move these solutions forward? And you need people. And you need power. You need resources. You need funding. And then you need groups to organize it and coordinate it. These are multi-year, multi-layer, very complex projects. And then you start to bring in partners, right? The county, state agencies, federal agencies, philanthropy. Now it's going to be green banks and CDFIs and those that are going to be stewarding boatloads of money through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. So there's all these kinds of layers of resources. But we have to start with conversations with our community that get us to the point where we can address the issues of climate change, but not use climate change as kind of like the sword and shield. You have to be able to get everybody together to have a larger conversation first.

DLT: And going back to Covid, did you personally contract Covid-19 during the early years of the pandemic?

SG: Yes. We, my family had gotten Covid after we had gotten the vaccine. And so it was scary, right, when we did. But we had protected ourselves for so long. We were able to protect ourselves and stay isolated. We as a family, so my husband and I and our three kids. Two months before Covid, my father-in-law was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer and so we knew that we needed to see him. We needed to be with him and support each other. But that was going to require us to be in really, really strict isolation. And so it had, just, impacts on our mental health, the mental health of our kids. But it was important as well. And luckily, he survived. He’s in remission. But when we did contract Covid, I think that there was a feeling that we were privileged to be protected for so long. And just kind of an acceptance that so many millions of people did not have that same privilege to be able to protect themselves. And even those that survive with Covid and still had, like, lingering health issues from it, I think about them to this day. Because I know that sometimes it feels like the world has moved on. But they're still suffering from impacts of this devastating pandemic.

DLT: And four years now since the start of lockdowns, would you say that your opinions on the pandemic, whether its management or its impacts, have changed over time?

SG: I think that I have so much respect for the science and the people behind the science. And it's one of those things where— I've never worked in health care before. I think that we, if, god forbid, we break a bone, god forbid something happens, you go to the hospital and you just expect to be treated. You expect to receive care. But you don't understand the mechanism behind it. You don't understand the science behind it. You just know that you get an IV or you go into surgery. And you're just fully trusting this health care system. And even though we know rhat it's far from perfect, I think what I saw through the four years of Covid, and where we're at now— Which is kind of like the other side of it, right? Like where the CDC has lifted, you know, all of these different kind of precautions. Or if you contract it, you're really treating it like a cold or the flu, where if you have some symptoms, like you should be thinking about how to protect others. But, we're sort of out of that emergency state, and I credit the people behind the science who have been able to help us get through it. And I also think that you realize fallibility and you realize that history is present. And so, when I— One thing I was like, trying to tell our kids, is that this was the first pandemic that we ever lived through. Because, you know, my youngest, he was just kindergarten age. He was just five. And so this was his reality. And for him not to have this kind of longer arc experience to say, no, this is not something that just occurs every few years. But this is something that is like a global crisis. I don't know. I think it just put into perspective the gratitude maybe I feel that we are on the other side of it, four years later.

DLT: And what do you feel have been the lasting effects of Covid, whether on your life, on Metro Detroit, or on the world?

SG: So, I hope the things that came out of Covid-19 that were the best of us will last. I think that we can think back on that time and we can remember the worst of it. We can remember, you know, some of the divisiveness. But in my experience, I saw first-hand, up close, people just doing whatever they could to protect one another. To protect not only their neighbors that they know, but strangers that they didn't know. People were driving masks an hour, sometimes, an hour-and-a-half away from where they live to deliver fifty masks to a small nursing home facility. And so I hope that that sense of connection, communal, our kind of collective experience, that we remember that, that we all experienced something at the same time, together. Even if there were differences in the way that we experienced it. But when we talk about the pandemic, everybody on Earth knows what time period we're talking about. And I hope that we can carry that collective experience and feeling that we are each other's keeper, that we would carry that forward here in Detroit, here in southeast Michigan, as a country, and as a planet.

DLT: And was there anything else you want to discuss, whether about Covid or climate change, that none of my questions have brought up?

SG: I know I had mentioned Planet Detroit. And I think that— I've worked with community organizations across the country. I was navigator for the national Justice40 Accelerator program. Once Highland Park Community Crisis Coalition became a member, I actually joined their team. And I realized that it is not common for there to be a local news organization that is solely dedicated on telling community stories around public health, the environment, and climate change, and that it is not— You know, everybody kind of holds a piece of the puzzle. A part of the solution. And I think that Planet Detroit holds a key piece of public information, that tells the stories and shares information with the community, about the community, for the community, and with the community. And so, Planet Detroit has community reporters that are embedded, from the neighborhoods, that are telling the stories of their neighborhoods and climate change, climate impacts, and public health. And I hope that it becomes a model for other communities and other places to have their own Planet Detroit. Because information and communication, storytelling, is going to be key to the solutions moving forward.

DLT: And you mentioned a lot of local organizations in this interview. Were there any others that you want to highlight before we finish up?

SG: Oh, gosh. There are so many remarkable people who've come together and formed organizations or coalitions that are addressing environmental injustice and climate impacts and have been doing so not just recently—because, you know, there's more of an uptick in the public discourse—but years and decades of organizing. So Green Door Initiative, Donele Wilkins, she is a stalwart environmental justice activist and leader. Her organization is really supporting workforce development around the green economy and really wanting to ensure that every Detroiter has access to the resources to live a thriving, sustainable, healthy, green life. She's launching a Motor City to Solar City Project in the neighborhood that she grew up in. There's Detroiters Working For Environmental Justice. Even in South End, where there is not a nonprofit dedicated, there's a civic group of people who are doing this work, EcoWorks. Eastside Community Network has launched a network of resilience centers, one of them named after a community leader who had passed away from Covid, and, in his memory, they've launched this resilience center. Elevate Energy is doing a lot of work around the city and around Southeast Michigan. And then one last one that I would love to spotlight is Ali Dirul, Ryter Cooperative Industries or RCI. He is a renewable energy contractor and based in Highland Park, lives down the street from Mama Shu, who runs Avalon Village. And he is ensuring that Detroiters and those who may not typically be able to leverage some of these larger contracts have an opportunity to get the workforce development taining that they need to install solar panels and to be a part of this new transition to a greener economy. So just an incredible number of organizations in Detroit, businesses as well, who are really going to be leading the charge around climate action.

DLT: All right, thank you so much. If you have no more final thoughts, then that was all the questions I had for you today.

SG: Thanks.

DLT: Thank you so much for your time.