What's Happening

July 12, 2024, Adrian, Michigan – The Adrian Dominican Sisters’ Adrian Resilient Community Initiative – approved in 2022 by the 2016-2022 General Council – is making a difference in the lives of youth who live in Adrian’s Historic East Side. 

The initiative, Growing up Resilient: The East Adrian Youth Resilience Collaborative, focuses on connecting participating youth and their families in East Adrian and the two Hispanic neighborhoods on the outskirts of Adrian with available community resources to expand literacy and family education and to connect the families with the resources they need. 

The plan includes developing Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) programs housed at the Boys and Girls Club of Lenawee and creating an Adrian Dominican Sisters Youth Learning Center and computer lab, to be housed in Ebeid Learning Center of ProMedica. This healthcare system encompasses southeastern Michigan and northern Ohio. 

Sisters, Associates, Co-workers, and the general public heard more about the initiative and its progress during a Lunch and Learn program offered June 12, 2024, at Weber Retreat and Conference Center.

“Our intent was not to duplicate efforts but to work collaboratively with other groups” to meet the needs of youth in the marginalized Historic East Side of Adrian, said Jennifer Hunter, Chief Operating Officer for the Adrian Dominican Sisters, and Co-chair of the Adrian Resilient Community Initiative Committee with Sister Sharon Weber, OP. 

The committee compared the population of the East Side with those of the rest of Lenawee County to determine the needs of the youth and families in that area and discovered several disparities. For example, 30% of East Adrian households are below the poverty line, compared to 11% in the rest of the community. 

Their discovery “formed our committee’s vision: a collaborative initiative among community members to provide youth in East Adrian with an opportunity for age-appropriate education and assistance in overcoming barriers,” Jennifer said.

Cody Waters, CEO of the Boys and Girls Club of Lenawee, spoke of the various programs offered by the club. Programs offer children the opportunity to develop in the areas of character and leadership, health and sports, academics, art, and career development.

In particular, Cody spoke of the organization’s summer camps to offer children a safe place while they experience art and enrichment in reading and mathematics. In the club’s peer-to-peer program, he said, older students help younger students improve their reading skills. 

Boys and Girls Club of Lenawee also relies on volunteers to help the children. “We want kids to enjoy what they’re doing and we want volunteers to enjoy it,” Cody said. “Relationship building is the key thing. Our team is trying to come up with different ways to get more mentors into the building.”  

Frank Nagel, Director of Community Impact for ProMedica, spoke of the healthcare system’s practice of screening patients for social factors that put them at a high risk. “When we have a patient at high risk for food insecurity, we can see at a ZIP Code level how these factors are taking place,” he said. People in Adrian’s ZIP Code, 49221, were in the “top five” of geographic areas with the need for greater resources, he said.

ProMedica first established an Ebeid Neighborhood Promise in Toledo “to address the gaps people have in attaining the resources they need,” Frank said. With the power of collaboration in Adrian, he said, “we can make sure that people are empowered to make lifestyle changes” that would improve their lives.

Lynne Punnett, Manager of Community Resilience for the resilience initiative in Adrian, said the Ebeid Center in Adrian has, since September 2023, been offering programs in areas such as financial literacy, home ownership, and parenting.  

This summer, the Ebeid Neighborhood Promise of Adrian is offering a six-week Literacy Pop-Up program in Adrian. For six mornings in June and July, children will be mentored as they focus on reading, writing, and Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM), Lynn said. Volunteer mentors include godparents, community members, and six Adrian Dominican Sisters.  

Partnership with the Adrian Dominican Sisters has “catalyzed this work … and brought us to a whole new level,” Frank said. “The power of this collaboration and partnership has been a humbling experience. I look forward to seeing the progress that is made because of our partnerships.”      

In late Spring, Boys and Girls Club of Lenawee publicly recognized the initiative by bestowing its Blue Door Award on the Adrian Dominican Sisters. “Through their generosity and steadfast support, the ‘Blue Door’ to our Club has been opened to so many local youth, and with the establishment of this new mentorship initiative, their impact on our Club and youth throughout the county will remain for decades and decades to come,” said Sara Herriman, Director of Development and Community Relations. 

“It was wonderful to be honored by and to partner with the Boys and Girls Club of Lenawee, an organization that has served the youth of our community so well for many years now,” Sister Sharon said.

“We were honored to be notified that the Adrian Dominican Sisters were being awarded the Blue Door Award by Boys and Girls Club of Lenawee,” Jennifer said.

•    Growing up Resilient is one of six initiatives developed by various regional groups of Adrian Dominican Sisters in response to the Congregation’s 2016 Resilient Communities Enactment. The other initiatives are:

•    Developing Resiliency in the Community of San José, Preravia Province, Dominican Republic. This initiative supports the construction of a technical school to offer training to local residents in fields needed by the local community.

•    Creating a More Resilient Immigration Community in McKinley Park (Illinois). The proposal is to establish a Comprehensive Adult Education Hub at Aquinas Literacy Center in Chicago’s McKinley Park neighborhood to offer GED instruction and literacy programs in the areas of computers, finances, the environment, and civics.

•    An investment to construct a second building at the Dominican School of Angeles City in the Mining barangay, Province of Pampanga, Philippines.

•    Affordable Housing as a Platform for Education Equity and Community Resilience. In partnership with Mercy Housing Northwest (MHNW), the initiative calls for extra in-house academic programs and social opportunities for children and their families in affordable MHNW housing projects to help them succeed academically.

•    The Empowering Resilient Women Initiative provides women in Flint, Michigan, who suffer from abuse with the resources they need to gain control of their lives, support for their families, and develop stronger communities.
 
 

 

July 12, 2024, Adrian, Michigan – During a two-day workshop, Healing Stories on Sacred Lands, more than 50 Adrian Dominican Sisters and Co-workers donned the lens of land justice to examine the past 500 years of domination of the Americas by European descendants and to begin the process of making communal decisions about the Motherhouse lands. 

The workshop, held at Weber Retreat and Conference Center last month, was facilitated by Brittany Koteles and Jessie Rathburn of Land Justice Futures. Land Justice Futures is on a two-year journey with the Adrian Dominican Sisters and other congregations of women religious to explore “what it looks like if we hold land justice as the center of our decisions about land,” Brittany said. 

Components of land justice include protecting land from extraction for minerals, oil, or other natural resources; regenerating the health of the land and ecosystems; and expanding land equity to Black, Indigenous, and other dispossessed communities. 

To set the context, Brittany and Jessie spent the first day reviewing the systems that led to the subjugation of Indigenous peoples and enslaved African peoples. Some of the forms of domination over the past 500 years included:

•    The Doctrine of Discovery: Jessie noted that papal documents in the 15th Century gave Christian European settlers the right to claim any land in the Americas for their country. The argument was that land not occupied by Christians is “empty” land and can thus be claimed by the European country making the “discovery,” Brittany said. Although Pope Francis repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery recently, these documents have still been cited as precedent in U.S. Supreme Court cases, most recently by the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, she said. The harm done by the Doctrine of Discovery “is not going to be undone by one unavailable solution,” Brittany said. “It’s going to happen…through deep commitment to healing and many, many experiments” in land justice.

•    Slavery: Jessie noted that the arrival of The White Lion, a ship carrying 30 captive Africans to Virginia, “began 250 years of chattel slavery, a race-based system of human bondage.” Although slavery was formally ended in the United States with the Emancipation Proclamation, African Americans still own only 2% of the land and have an average family wealth of $3,500, compared to $147,000 for the average white family, Brittany said. 

•    Broken Treaties and Displacement: Jessica outlined the numerous treaties between the United States and individual states with Indigenous peoples. She gave the example of the 1807 Treaty of Detroit, between the United States and the Odawa, Ojibwe, Wyandot, and Potawatomi Nations. They were given only a fraction of the worth of the land and then forced to leave their land. Through the 1830 Indian Removal Act, 60,000 Indigenous peoples living East of the Mississippi River were forced to move west onto reservations, Jessie said. 

•    Boarding Schools: Under the U.S. Boarding School Policy, Indigenous children were forced to leave their families to attend boarding schools to teach them the mainstream culture. “Many grew ill and even died,” Jessie said. “Many were subject to physical, psychological, and sexual abuse and told to let all that is Indian within them die out.”

•    Racial Terror: “Black families faced the terror of intimidation, harassment, and lynching in the Jim Crow South,” Jessie said, adding that African American families who owned land were targeted so that the white mobs could steal their land.

Brittany acknowledged that this history can be difficult to hear, but she also gave the workshop participants reason to hope. “We are in an era of change,” she said. “Now we identify ourselves as stewards of a new paradigm. What if this moment is the most powerful of all? What if decisions about land had the power to change an entire culture?”

On the second day, participants heard from two activists who are operating out of a more just, inclusive vision. 

Julie Dye, a member of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi and the Federal Advisory Committee on Reconciliation in Place Names, spoke of her efforts to counter the hurtful appropriation of Indigenous cultures by mainstream society. 

Julie recalled attending and graduating from a high school bordered by other schools that used Native names as their mascots. “It was very hurtful,” she said. “It hurt so bad to see what was being done to the beautiful culture that all of us were trying to reclaim.”

Indigenous people “have always been a resource for white sellers – the land, the water, our children, our art, and ultimately our identity,” Julie said. “They turn us into a monolith of one people when we are hundreds of people. They trivialize and commodify our rich cultures. All of this contributes to our invisibility and our marginalization.”   

Erin Bevel, Board President of the Detroit Black Community Food Sovereignty Network, spoke of her organization’s efforts to foster urban gardening among African Americans in Detroit. 

The Food Sovereignty Network opened the Detroit People’s Food Co-Op, a “Black-led and community-owned grocery cooperative to give Detroit residents greater access to healthy food.” The network has also raised money to help Black residents buy the vacant lots on which they had planted community gardens.

“Growing food and having the ability to cultivate land is the work of our ancestors,” Erin said. “This is how our ancestors created the human civilization – having a relationship with Mama Earth.” Food sovereignty touches on the ability to “determine where our food comes from and how we nourish and take care of ourselves,” she explained. 

The Land Justice workshop ended with a contemplative opportunity in which participants took on the voices of Adrian Dominican ancestors; the present-day Congregation; descendants, Sisters who will be affected by land decisions; and Earth to discuss the possibilities of land justice in future decisions about the Adrian Dominican Sisters’ land. 

Healing Stories on Sacred Lands is the beginning of the Congregation’s process of discernment about the future heritage of the Motherhouse land.