Hero Story

Cody Rouge Community Action Alliance (CRCAA) is a community-based development organization in Detroit. Its Cody Rouge Youth Council is a youth-led coalition of teenagers that meets weekly and works together as community advocates, closely in connection with local government and community leaders. Our focus is to empower youth to refine their leadership skills and become agents of positive impactful change in their area. Our vision is to have youth involvement in neighborhood revitalization and decision-making.

Cody Rouge is a community located on the far west side of the City of Detroit in Wayne County. Our primary service area goes from M-153 (Ford Road) on the South to I-96 (Jeffries Freeway) on the North and includes Rouge Park on the West over to Greenfield Road on the East. The Youth Council is made up of young people that live, work, worship or attend school in the Cody Rouge area.

The Cody Rouge Youth Council is actively engaged in youth development programming and service projects year-round. Highlights have included:

–Supporting the annual “Keep Cody Rouge Clean & Safe” initiative;
–Helping to design and activate upgrades to Stein Park in their neighborhood;
–Collaborating with the City of Detroit Planning & Development Department on a neighborhood framework for the future of the community;
–Supporting a mural project in collaboration with the City of Detroit to beautify the West Warren Avenue commercial corridor;
–Creating care packages for local college students;
–Collecting and distributing toiletry products for less fortunate community members;
–Serving as tutors for younger children at a local community center;
–Creating the Cody Calm Center, a youth-led wellness room.

Young people are typically left out of community revitalization dialogues. This can mean that their needs are not prioritized, and they can feel detached from or alienated by changes being made. In Cody Rouge, we ask youth: “What do you want to see in your neighborhood? How do you want to make sure you see it? How can we make it possible for you to lead neighborhood change?”

The Youth Council then responds. For example, they saw that many of their peers were struggling with mental health challenges and felt isolated. So we helped them launch the Cody Calm Center (C3), a wellness room designated for teens to have a space to relax, recenter and realign their mind. This center provides many different activities and experiences that calm the mind and the body specifically for young people. Now with C3, young people have the opportunity to focus on their mind’s health with meditation, yoga, a therapists directory, fidgets, and much more.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) gave us a prize for this initiative through their HHS Children and Youth Resilience Challenge. They said, “...HHS received more than 500 submissions outlining diverse, culturally relevant, and community-grounded ideas for how to promote resilience among children and youth. This extraordinary response was one of the largest in Challenge.gov’s history.” We were one of 14 organizations nationwide that received an award.