Before departing after 20years as a teacher at Cranbrook Schools in Bloomfield Hills, Holly Arida asked her advanced entrepreneurship class to “design my next gig.”
The assignment got them thinking not only of their own futures but also about the futures of others. “They decided that what they were learning collectively was very valuable and wanted to continue it for Detroit youth,” Arida says. So in 2022, she and the students created the nonprofit YouthTank Detroit “with the moon shot” to turn it into an entrepreneurship trade school for Detroit high schoolers. “The students filed the 501(c)(3), designed our first websites, came up with the name, and met with private and public partners.”
Arida says YouthTank Detroit was established to provide students free entrepreneurial guidance and the opportunity to develop transferable technical and professional leadership skills to “feed the talent pipeline to Detroit’s economic growth and community prosperity.” The program, which also offers internship opportunities, runs after school, on weekends, and in the summer.
Arida discovered the importance of entrepreneurship at an early age.
At 19, she opened the Detroit franchise of the courier service Aramex after her freshman year at the University of Michigan, where she obtained an undergraduate history degree at the Dearborn campus and later a master’s degree in modern Middle Eastern and North African studies at the U-M Rackham Graduate School.
After selling her business in 2002, Arida made a career pivot and began teaching a course at Cranbrook Schools called Current Middle East Conflicts. “I had been a successful entrepreneur and was simply called to teach after the tragedy of 9/11,” she says. “I knew a lot about the Middle East and felt it was a part of the world people needed to understand.”
Arida later developed “Bridge the Divide,” a partnership initiative with Cranbrook, the University of Michigan, various urban institutions, and public school students to prepare learners from different socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds to work together on collaborative leadership projects that benefited the community. From 2014 to 2016, she ran a summer entrepreneurship program at TechTown in Detroit, and in 2019, she helped create at Cranbrook “Department X,” an innovative, project-based entrepreneurship and leadership curriculum.
This past summer, YouthTank Detroit, along with partners including, among others, Google’s Code Next, Design Core Detroit at the College of Creative Studies, and the city’s Office of Mobility Innovation, ran a mobility leadership lab at the newly opened Michigan Central Station on the dedicated youth floor on the fifth level.
The nonprofit hired 63 summer interns, some of whom were peer leaders and worked with 53 high schoolers. Projects included performing research on mobility infrastructure for the electric vehicle startup Treehouse at NewLab and a neighborhood mobility hub initiative that used coding and artificial intelligence to make recommendations to the Office of Mobility Innovation.
Arida says that new initiatives this year include introducing an intense engineering practicum that will meet several times a week in partnership with the startup JustAir, an air-quality control software platform, and launching an after-school program for high schoolers to bring a product to market sold at Yellow Light on Michigan Central’s first floor.
Arida is more than satisfied with her latest career pivot. “Looking out at the city in every direction from the fifth floor of Michigan Central with our partners and students, and seeing through the eyes of young people what they see for the future of our city and what they imagine, is the highest honor and responsibility for me.”
This story originally appeared in the December 2024 issue of Hour Detroit magazine. To read more, pick up a copy of Hour Detroit at a local retail outlet. Our digital edition will be available on Dec. 9.
|
|
|
