My Month as an Executive Intern

Since the beginning of June I've spent most of my Tuesdays and Thursdays here:

This is called Cadillac Place. It used to home to the corporate offices of General Motors, but now it houses offices of the State of Michigan on its 15 floors including the Executive Office of the Governor. 

Cadillac Place was designed by Albert Kahn the famous Detroit architect who designed famous buildings known for their industry such as the Packard Plant, the Rouge Plant, and the Willow Run Bomber plant, as well as some beauties like the Fisher Building, the Belle Isle Aquarium, and the Detroit Athletic Club, which you can see any time you watch a home run ball leave Comerica Park. And he spared no expenses so that GM employees could work in style. 

My first day, I walked in through the main hallway and marveled at the incredible detail of the floors and ceiling. I catch myself on a daily basis open-mouthed and staring at the decor. 

This car is not here. Nor the woman pulling up her pants. 

My small cubicle is on the 14th floor in the Governor's suite. It used to be the office for Alfred P. Sloan, the second president of General Motors. The penthouse office on the corner with an amazing view of downtown Detroit was Sloan's office and is now where the Governor operates while staying in Detroit. If you look in the picture above on the far left side, you will see some windows at the top of the building. One of those is mine, giving me views of the North End neighborhood, the Highland Park Plant (also a Kahn Building), and what I believe to be the Warren City Center, roughly 12 miles to the north. 

In the few weeks that I have been working in this building, I never get tired of the view inside or out. I do get tired of the work at hand. I took the job, working in the Governor's Office of Urban and Metropolitan Initiatives(OUMI) because I had heard the director speak at a student planning conference in Ypsilanti. He was an elegant speaker and was very in tune with the political wrangling it takes to actually DO things. He also spoke about something he called the 'School-Anchor Initiative.' 

The 'School-Anchor Initiative' is simple enough. The idea is that instead of closing schools that can no longer fill seats or that are struggling financially, why not use the already owned buildings and fill them with services. The services will be included as extra revenue for the schools, as the service providers will rent space in the school thereby helping the schools financial woes. Additionally, the services provided will be much closer to families who live in the neighborhood. Instead of driving across town for a health clinic, families can go to their local school. If parents need to take a night class to gain new skills, why offer them at a location far from home when they can go to a neighborhood school with child care services already built-in? 

It was this kind of project that I thought was so interesting and that OUMI would give me a chance to work on projects from the state perspective. OUMI also has an 'Urban Agenda.' The 'Urban Agenda' is a collection of 12 focus areas that the office is primarily focused on concentrating efforts around. Each area has several primary and secondary indicators to inform us if we are meeting these objectives. As an intern, I have the opportunity to propose a project to go on that agenda. I've found it to be quite difficult. 

One example of a focus area is 'Civic Engagement.' I have ideas about what civic engagement is and I'm sure if you thought about it, you probably do too. For me it revolves around the idea that people will be active engaged in their communities by attending events, staying in touch with people, volunteering for organizations, and overall being involved with their community. (This, by the way, is something that I think is very difficult to achieve and something that I want to spend my energies on when I return to school in the fall.) For the 'Urban Agenda', civic engagement is measured by the number of registered voters in a city and the number of neighborhood clubs registered. I haven't thought about what I would use to measure civic engagement, but this just seems a little thin to me. 

If I could sum up my experience so far, that would probably be the best way to say it: 'It just seems a little thin to me.' It is nothing against my director, my supervisor, the people I'm working with or for. I find myself amazed that I can sit and stare out my window thinking about projects that might be worth pursuing. If its something I think is interesting, I write up a summary, and I will share it with my director next week. That's how policy is developed. That scares me.

I've enjoyed this experience. I've been able to interact with a lot of high-profile people and I work in a cool building. I've learned a lot too, but mostly things I don't want to do. I can say that my director works in a collaborative way, much like how we learned in my collaborative planning class. I can also say that when you get to know people who are hanging around the Governor's Office, you start to know people who are going to be included in conversations and who is not. This also reminds me of collaborative planning when we talked about including everyone, even people whose opinions are different. 

I will not be entering politics or policy or anything remotely related to state level work after this experience. My skills are best utilized on the ground at the neighborhood level. I think I want to work with neighborhoods or small communities to enhance community engagement. What can we do to improve the activity in a community? What can we do to encourage the interactions of people, particularly interactions between people who are different? I believe this to be one of the most important things to think about for our democracy. I will keep working on what this means and report back to you. Meanwhile, I only have another month to go before my time at the Governor's Office is over. Excuse me while I marvel at the ceiling.