In November 2006, six of the region's top civic organizations - New Detroit, the Detroit Regional Chamber, Detroit Renaissance, United Way for Southeastern Michigan, the Detroit Metro Convention and Visitors Bureau and the Cultural Alliance of Southeastern Michigan - joined forces to form a unified group called One D: Transforming Regional Detroit to ensure the region works together to achieve measurable goals in six areas of priority: economic prosperity, educational preparedness, regional transit, race relations, regional cooperation and quality of life. While each of these organizations works to meet specific objectives of its own, all recognize that they have a collective responsibility to the region as well.

Input and data gained from the community, government officials and other organizations outside of One D are extremely important factors in the success of this unprecedented transformation effort, and will be used by One D to build a one-vision, one-plan blueprint for transforming Southeast Michigan. The final blueprint is expected to be unveiled at the 2007 Mackinac Policy Conference.

As part of this data gathering effort, Issue Media Group and United Way for Southeastern Michigan have partnered to regularly survey the Detroit region, on behalf of the One D partnership and each of its member organizations, 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 are at an important crossroads for this region and we want to be able to measure our progress through the opinions of its residents. We hope you will want to join us on this journey.

We will be delivering a new survey each month. Upon review and analysis, we will select the most pertinent questions and repreat them at regular intervals over the next several years. In this way we will be able to track perceptual change over time and match that to the demographic and economic indicators that will comprise the One D Report Card.

Our first survey appeared in the February 15 issue of Metro Mode and was designed to obtain feedback on “quality of life” issues in Southeast Michigan. This report provides the results of that survey.

On March 22 we launched a survey designed to obtain feedback related to the new “branding” effort from the Metro Convention and Visitors Bureau. Late in April we hope to look at Race Relations in Metro Detroit. Future surveys will delve into Art and Culture, Transportation, Education, Economic Opportunities and more. We welcome suggestions from organizations and individuals regarding other issues of importance and hope that you will join us as we take the “Pulse of Metro Detroit."

>> Click here to download the full report [75 KB]