Issue Media Group and United Way for Southeastern Michigan have partnered to regularly survey and poll the Detroit region regarding key quality of life and economic issues in order to get a better handle on “the pulse of southeast Michigan.” We want to serve up surveys that will better help us, and others, understand what our residents are thinking. We want to open this capacity to other organizations that are working to make the Detroit region a better place to live and work. We welcome others to work with us to design these surveys and United Way will analyze the results. Our hope is that this work will lead to a regular (at least twice a year) large scale “Pulse of Metro Detroit” survey that will allow us to track progress. We are at an important crossroads for this region, when many organizations are beginning to come together to develop a strategic plan for transforming the region. We know that such an effort will be successful and we want to be able to measure this success through the eyes of its residents. We hope you will want to join us on this journey.

We have just completed our first “baby step” with a small-scale survey that we launched on September 4. Our intent was to ask a few questions in order to help us understand more about our audience and what you care about, and to help us identify ways to get people who are interested in Model D and Detroit involved in community-based projects. We received 937 responses to our survey over the course of the 9 days that we collected information. [The survey is still available if you have not taken the opportunity to respond.]

Click here to download a Summary of the results. We thank those of you who participated and we hope that more will join us in the future. For those of you who want more detailed information, such as complete answers to the open-ended questions and the demographic characteristics of the respondents, please contact Kurt Metzger at kurt.metzger@uwsem.org.