There is a growing need to come together across place, practice, and lived experience. Not only to reflect on the work, but to strengthen the relationships, language, and collective imagination that will carry it forward.

This work is already happening in neighborhoods, coalitions, cultural spaces, and systems being reimagined every day. It’s part of a much longer lineage of practice led by communities who have always found ways to build, care for, and transform the places they call home.

The People’s Practice exists within a broader continuum of community-led work that helps surface connections across geographies, disciplines, and lived contexts that have often remained fragmented, under-recognized, or institutionally disconnected.

Now, we get to step into that connection together.

Across three days, we will move through Detroit and through each other’s work, gathering in neighborhoods, engaging local practitioners, sharing meals, participating in working sessions, and creating space for reflection, exchange, and collective inquiry.

Organized around three thematic lanes: narrative change, arts and culture, and power and ownership, the gathering will explore how these areas intersect, helping us build deeper connections, sharpen shared ideas, and imagine new possibilities for multigenerational futures.

Beyond sharing knowledge, this is a space for us to strengthen the field by deepening connections, achieving greater alignment, celebrating the work that brought us here, and exploring what it would take to move toward collective action.

Consider this your invitation to recognize what we’ve been building and to keep building it, together.

AT A GLANCE