After more than 20 years of connecting media, art, and social justice, the Allied Media Conference (AMC) is being put on hold indefinitely. This isn’t a sad moment for Detroit, however, as Allied Media Projects (AMP), the organization that hosts the conference, is focusing its efforts on the LOVE Building, a community space in the Core City neighborhood where residents can soon go for free legal help, internet access, and even a healthy meal.
Beyond the colorful facade at 4731 Grand River Ave., the LOVE Building holds six nonprofits and a future plant-based restaurant. This includes AMP, Detroit Disability Power (DDP), Detroit Justice Center (DJC), Detroit Community Technology Project, Detroit Narrative Agency, and Paradise Natural Foods.
Across its five floors, the building will be a container for community projects, health and wellness classes, resources for Core City residents, events, and creative projects.
“The LOVE Building itself is also a nonprofit that is going to be managing the space and kind of facilitating programs,” Jeanette “Jenny” Lee, interim director of the LOVE Building, tells Metro Times. “We went through a two-year process to design with nearby residents a community benefits agreement for the building … and so that’s what the LOVE Building will be primarily responsible for bringing to life in partnership with all the tenants.”
During those two years, the LOVE Building worked with Sidewalk Detroit and its tenants like DDP and the DJC to ask Core City residents what they needed. One request from residents was a place where they could have access to computers to check emails and print documents, which the LOVE Building will offer in its reception area. Residents also wanted public places to charge electronics, so the Detroit Community Technology Project is planning to install solar-powered charging hotspots with the capacity to charge motorized wheelchairs at nearby bus stops.
The community benefits agreement, or CBA, developed by the LOVE Building also includes plans for a forthcoming pocket park with stormwater management and accessibility features, and a neighborhood directory of food pantries, mutual aid programs, and temporary housing options.
DDP will offer resources like a lending library with audio and Braille books and resources to help find accessible housing.
“Voting rights and housing are our main two focuses because those are two huge barriers that disabled people face that if remedied, would blow down the dam of resources, and we found that’s exactly what the residents of Core City were saying they needed,” Ramiro Alvarez, communications director at Detroit Disability Power, says. “We are addressing that by continuing to have a really tight relationship with the folks here. They can use all of the organizing resources in our office and we’re just overall committed to being the access and disability champions for Core City folks.”
Part of the DJC’s contribution is to provide free legal clinics, “know your rights” sessions, and walk-in services to help people with tenant’s rights, family court, traffic violations, and getting their driver’s licenses reissued.
“Our mission is abolition. We do not believe that people should be in cages,” says Lauren Thomas, community legal advocate at Detroit Justice Center. “People are being incarcerated because they can’t pay a ticket, then they can’t pay the bond, and then it just snowballs. Most people in Michigan [who] are in jail have not been convicted of a crime. These are people who are in jail because they cannot pay, so that is why we’re tackling these lower-level offenses first.”
DJC will also host workshops on how to establish housing co-ops and land trusts, which Thomas sees as affordable housing models that will help safeguard Detroiters from being pushed out of their neighborhoods.
“Cooperative housing is big for us and we have a whole team of folks that can teach not only what in the world a co-op is, but how to help you get started with it,” she says. “There are so many barriers to the legal system and barriers to justice. You think, ‘I got this ticket, I can’t pay it, but am I really gonna get a lawyer for it?’ Then it affects your housing because if you’re in jail, you’re not working. Then you can’t pay your rent. So those are what we’re tackling when we’re talking about abolition.”
For the past five years, the DJC has only taken clients through referral partners, and now residents will be able to come directly to the LOVE Building for assistance.
For Allied Media Projects’ part, the organization is refocusing its efforts on being a behind-the-scenes facilitator and providing financial backing to the LOVE Building and community efforts. Posters of past Allied Media Conferences are all over the building, and though the event is being dissolved, AMP co-executive Director Toni Moceri says the LOVE Building is “the embodiment of the AMC in permanent form.”
“Our approach to the LOVE Building is centering disability justice, creating community safety without police, healing justice practice spaces, kids spaces, beautiful, participatory design, liberatory dancefloors, equitable food systems, and more much, like the AMC,” she says.
AMP has been working as a fiscal sponsor for community organizations and projects since 2014 and Moceri says they have been able to facilitate over $100 million to projects not just in Detroit but nationally. AMP has sponsored everything from artist grants to coworking spaces for women and BIPOC writers, digital magazines, and beyond. Locally, AMP has helped fund the Black Bottom Archives, Tostada Magazine, Motor City Street Dance Academy, AfroFuture Youth, Bulk Space, Room Project, and more.
From here on out, AMP is focusing on more programming and events that uplift the work of groups they are supporting financially. On Friday, Sept. 8, AMP is launching a funding campaign to secure $6 million over the next four years that will help them continue their work.
“We’ve been developing our fiscal sponsorship expertise for the last decade, and what we deeply understand is that we need to focus our attention on supporting the over 130 projects that we’re in the closest relationship with,” Moceri says. “This means developing more robust resources for our sponsored projects, centering those based in Detroit, and welcoming them into the LOVE Building to inspire a new era of envisioning and practicing the worlds we need.”
Another LOVE Building tenant, Paradise Natural Foods, does pop-ups and catering but hasn’t had a brick-and-mortar since the 1980s.
The mostly plant-based business, helmed by chef and owner “Mama” Nezaa Bandele, will have a deli and marketplace inside the building, and will also host wellness and nutrition classes.
“Even though we’re not a nonprofit, we’re aligned with the overarching mission of being of service to the community,” Bandele says. “We think feeding the movement, feeding our neighbors real food — good food, life-affirming food — is radically a part of the nonprofit landscape, even though we are a for-profit business.”
Paradise Natural Foods works with urban farms like D-Town Farms and Keep Growing Detroit to provide healthy food with locally sourced ingredients based on what’s in season. Bandele’s food is inspired by her Jamaican background but she serves healthier versions of dishes from the African diaspora and beyond like plant-based lasagna, vegan red velvet cake, soul food platters, and Jamaican sea moss shakes.
She has been teaching classes on health and wellness in Detroit for over a decade and calls herself a “community health educator by training and a chef by necessity.”
“It became kind of like church for people over the 10 years where people would show up and share their success stories about being able to mitigate life-threatening and chronic illness just through learning what we taught, whether it was hands-on cooking, nutrition, education, or whatever,” she says about her classes. “So I’m excited about this project, because a lot of people think of us more of like we cater and we do food pop-ups, and only some know that we also do community health education. We’ll be able to bring all of that together in this space."
The LOVE Building will not have an official grand opening until some time next year when Paradise Natural Foods is fully operational, Lee tells Metro Times, but the other organizations are moved in and preparing to offer their services. Detroiters will get their first chance to check out the new building during the AMP Seeds Series event “Waging Love: Building an Environmentally Just Detroit” on Sept. 14. It’s the first event in the LOVE Building and brings together Detroit climate activists Monica Patrick-Lewis, Chrystal Ridgeway, and Ahmina Maxey, who will share strategies and visions for a more environmentally just Detroit.
Ramirez calls the LOVE Building probably one of the most accessible buildings in Detroit, or maybe even the entire state of Michigan.
“We’re talking about not just physical access, but economic and legal access, food access, health access,” he says. “We’re stretching, here in this building, the definition of accessibility into something really lovely.”
For more information, see thelovebuilding.org.
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