The Catherine Ferguson Academy is on its summer schedule, and the custodians’ floor-polishing has pushed much of what is unique about the Detroit charter high school into the halls. A line of high chairs blocks a row of lockers. A table with built-in chairs for four infants stands near a pushcart designed to hold nine […]
Quality of Life
Michigan is a great place to live. Bridge will report that fact often — and on potential threats to the assets that make it so.
Posted inQuality of Life
Learning life outdoors: Old idea, new generation
Dick Laing recalls with pride working with Michigan Tech Universityon a residential “boot camp” style program in forestry and conservation skills in the Upper Peninsula that helped disadvantaged youngsters develop life skills. The program eventually fell victim to budgetary neglect, he says. Laing never doubted, however, the value of the effort to put children from urban […]
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In Detroit, wheels on the bus go round and …
At a time when many of his peers are finishing college to find a still-depressed job market, Andy Didorosi isn’t waiting for anyone to offer him a slot. At 25, the college dropout describes himself as a “social entrepreneur” and is currently at work on his latest start-up — the Detroit Bus Company, founded with […]
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Sorry, baby: Delivery docs in short supply Up North
Kristin and Warren Scaife fishtailed along the gravel road that winds south out of Grand Marais, on the rocky shores of Lake Superior. Kristin was in labor, but she couldn’t go to the closest hospital. Helen Newberry Joy Hospital didn’t have a birthing unit. A decade earlier, Kristin’s mother-in-law had found that out when she […]
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CMU eyes locals to relieve doctor shortage for rural Michigan
Northern Michigan needs to take a gardening approach to solve its shortage of medical services, and grow its own doctors. That’s the advice of Ernie Yoder, dean of the yet-to-open Central Michigan University College of Medicine. The shortage of physicians in the northern half of the Lower Peninsula and in the U.P. causes some rural […]
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Kicking cancer, embracing hope
When Jamiah Williams sat down to watch the St. Jude Telethon, an annual event dedicated to raising money for children’s cancer research, she did so simply to spend some quality time with her mother. Little did the 9-year-old from Detroit know that just a few months later she, too, would be diagnosed with cancer. “It […]
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Talking Detroit's Eastern Market, the hunt for the Michigan potato, and other food stuff
Dan Carmody joined Detroit’s Eastern Market Corp. in 2007, just in time to catch the local-food wave. The market district covers one square mile on Detroit’s east side and holds about 150 businesses, but the public draws are the five city-owned structures where, on Saturdays year-round, Metro Detroiters flock to buy fresh produce, meat and […]
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Michigan food and the case of the Chinese cherries
Matt Gougeon runs the Marquette Food Co-op, a store that began the way a lot of co-ops did in the 1970s, as a buying club for a number of families who wanted food that was hard to find in the Upper Peninsula. Over the years, it’s grown into a 3,200-square-foot store with $5 million in […]
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Michigan gets med-school boom, doctor bust
More doctors will be graduating from Michigan medical schools in the next decade. Whether that means more doctors practicing in Michigan is another matter. New medical schools have opened, or will open soon, at Oakland University, Central Michigan University and Western Michigan University. Michigan State University’s two medical schools also are greatly expanding their enrollment. […]
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Beaumont's success fuels medical brain drain
You can’t swing a stethoscope at Beaumont Health System without hitting a resident. More than 400 young doctors — 429, to be exact — are working as residents and fellows at hospitals in Royal Oak, Troy and Grosse Pointe, making Beaumont, until recently, the largest training hospital in the country without its own medical school, […]
