Families & Community

There’s been lots of talk lately about refugees, mostly about whether to let them into the U.S. and how they’re being vetted. But there is a human side to this story about what it actually feels like to be a refugee. So today on State of Opportunity, we're going to spend some time with a refugee who's called Michigan his home for the past four years.

Kent County Sherriff Deputy Patrick Stewart was on his lunch break last week. Lunch, in his case, was at 12:30 in the morning. He stopped at a fire house in the town of Cutlerville, on the outskirts of Grand Rapids.

"And I heard a very loud knocking, pounding on the door," he says. "When I got to the door, there was a frantic man there saying that he had somebody – his buddy – in the back of his vehicle, and had ODed on heroin, and was no longer breathing."

Stewart called for an ambulance, and started chest compressions on the man. When the ambulance arrived, the paramedic who came to help is actually Stewart’s wife, Amanda. She gave the man a drug called Naloxone. It works as basically an antidote to a heroin overdose, reviving someone who’s on the verge of slipping away. Together, the newly married husband and wife saved the man’s life.

That part of the story is remarkable.

Everything else about it has become far too common, says Kent County Undersheriff Michelle Young.

Connections is a State of Opportunity documentary about the power of networks.

Some questions we tackle: How do you create a network when you live in poverty? What networking advice would you give to a teenager from a low-income family? In terms of mentoring someone you have no connection to: Why do it? When you're locked up in prison, away from everyone and everything you know and love, how do you build a new life for yourself when you get out? 

If you don’t have a network, it can be very difficult to advance socially or in your career. One non-profit leader I spoke to called it a “crisis of relationships.” 

That’s exactly the kind of crisis Deondr’e Austin faced five years ago. He says as far as finding a legal job, it was hard. "As far as find anything else that was bad in the world, the network can find a lot of bad things."

In some circles, "network" is a dirty word, something we don't like to talk about lest we admit out loud that maybe, just maybe, we didn't get where we are in the world today by grit and determination and hard work alone. But I'm guessing that many of us got where we are today through a combination of hard work and a few helpful connections along the way.

Of all the roadblocks between urban communities and economic development, a failing public school is one of the hardest problems to fix.

The Osborn neighborhood in northeast Detroit has been living with this struggle for some time.

 Now, thanks to a surge of support from businesses and nonprofits, Osborn has managed to turn a corner –and the instrument guiding that turnaround has been the neighborhood’s high school.