For the second consecutive year, the Cass Corridor Commons and Semester in Detroit have collaborated with the Rackham Program in Public Scholarship to host their annual Institute for Social Change (ISC) - a five-day community engagement training experience for UM graduate student fellows across all disciplines who plan to become civically-engaged faculty scholars.  This year, nearly two dozen graduate students from disciplines including everything from anthropology to digital technology to public health, visited the Cass Corridor Commons and conducted focus-group listening sessions with its stakeholders, including: the Sugar Law Center, Detroit Audubon, the Center for Community-Based Enterprise, EMEAC and Semester in Detroit (which partners with the Commons to host classes, programming, and to house a subset of the SiD student cohort.)

Building upon the first such collaboration in 2018, in addition to collaborating with the ISC in 2019, the Cass Corridor Commons and Semester in Detroit were awarded funding to support a summer 2019 Public Engagement Fellowship for Joel Batterman, Detroit resident, main organizer of Motor City Freedom Riders and UM Doctoral Student in Urban Planning.  Joel will spend the 2019 summer conducting stakeholder interviews, enhancing communications practices, and proposing capacity-building initiatives toward the long-term sustainability of the Cass Corridor Commons.  The fellowship work will help to position the Cass Corridor Commons and Semester in Detroit as they partner with the Rackham Institute for Social Change for the third consecutive year in May 2020.