Occupy the Cold

Ann Arbor, University of Michigan, second floor of Mason Hall, room 2449.

I’m looking out the window, half-listening as my professor lays out the next assignment. “What do you care about?” Jeremy Chamberlin poses a prompt to the room— to me. He’s asking us to consider our souls for a journalism project, which feels almost illicit in the context of academic scholarship.

I imagine myself as the person lying face down in the leaves outside. My gaze disconnects from the room, suspended somewhere between the window and the ground below. I smell the scent of decaying leaves. I feel a multitude of stems gently poking me where my clothes are thin. Somehow, it makes me restless for childhood memories and, at the same time, for the promise of becoming dust; it feels like a hug from both sides of being alive.

*

It’s hard to forget your first night in the cold.

The mercury had dropped well below freezing. All I had was a fleece-lined jacket and a falsa blanket. I lay on the forest floor just outside of town like a lost rifle, sober and articulate, feeling everything— every tremor of cold moving through me, every ounce of blood retreating from my extremities to protect my internal organs. 

The chest begins to rattle like a diesel engine. Spasms seize the muscles, plucking and rearranging them like a spool of yarn.

At first, it feels like dying. Then it feels like you’re becoming a drop of light that sinks below your sternum as your breathing slows to a faint, unnatural pulse. 

Sleep comes, but your listening remains awake— the forest keeps a furious sermon. 

Eventually, movements of life and light return, pulling you with them. You begin to reenter your body, brush off the thin crust of snow that tucked itself around you, and, against all odds, you find your feet once more.

*

Walking down S. 4th toward Bethlehem United Church of Christ, just a block from the Blake Transit Center where I arrived, I approached the stone sanctuary. A few rambunctiously stoned gentlefolk milled around across the street. Passing between them, my story as a sober ex-convert felt humorously ironic. My stomach roiled as I aimed my feet toward the side door of the church.

I introduced myself over the intercom, was buzzed in, and met Lindsay Calka, the Managing Director and Publisher of Groundcover News, who escorted me to the middle of the room just as a man began to materialize from the static of a burnt-orange armchair.

“Larzell! You got a minute to talk to this guy?” 

“— uh, sure.”

I was there to talk to Lindsay Calka, but she very quickly assumed otherwise. So I pulled up a polite wooden chair, sat cross-legged, with my notebook and pen, while Larzell slowly nuzzled his body into the armchair. Larzell Washington had a grey beard, a gruff, lyrical voice, and the eyes of a friend. Mr. Washington was someone you feel you immediately know, but should never assume anything about. We’ve all seen people like that—as if you’d known them in another time and form. But a familiar feeling is not knowing. It’s an opportunity for grace, if you don’t ruin it with pride. 

“I’ve gone there (the Delonis Center), off and on, for years.” Larzell starts in his mellow, rumbling voice, his eyes half closed.

When someone like Mr. Washington tells a story, there’s good reason to listen without interruption. First, he lets you watch his thought process in real time. Most people are too self-conscious for that; they have a flurry of thoughts before the one they say out loud—our own cultural censorship. Second, if you don’t learn to sit still and listen through the meandering and even the nonsense, you’ll never hear him say things like, “We compromise because of our struggles… which is understanding, not just individually, but collectively. Certain old remedies is still good.”

“Old remedies” made me think of Alligator Wine, but I know he’s talking about compassion.

The church basement had grown a tad loud at this point, but I only know this from listening back to the recording. I was so focused on him that I didn’t hear the chaos happening around us. In post, it felt like atmospheric pressure testing the limits of an outsider—checking whether I would adjust to the scene or fall prey to misplaced apprehensions, like an immune system passively interrogating a new substance introduced to the body.

Larzell was being very kind and open with me, a perfect stranger, so it was only right that I return the favor. I talked briefly about my three years on and off the street, being homeless in L.A., and how I never felt comfortable going to any of the shelters. The people who stood in line and the building itself gave me paranoia. We shared this discomfort, both of us preferring a quiet glade.

“There are pros and cons,” Larzell continued about the Delonis Center. “Some people feel trapped. A lot of people go to those shelters; they seek help, but they still want to go to the bathroom, do crack, and they get found in the bathroom, OD’ed.”

I’m picturing a glass pipe and beige ceramic tiles lit by fluorescence.

“They go on an alcoholic binge once the lights go out. A lot of times there’s depression, a lot of times there’s addiction—but the problem is…”

He’s talking to me like I’m his son or his congregant. My father was a minister, so I get that feeling mixed up.

“Delonis is not a rehabilitation center,” he says. “It’s a place you’re supposed to come, lay down, get up, and try to dig out the hole.”

I began to scribble furiously.

One of the few questions I had written down before arriving at the church was about the nature of low-barrier shelters that provide paraphernalia—I framed it as a safe space, and paraphernalia as a logical step if it were already low-barrier.

“I feel that’s enabling somebody,” Larzell said.

I’m beginning to think that he’s more straight-edged than I am.

He explained that the center’s distribution of paraphernalia, intended for harm reduction, inadvertently enabled individuals to bring substances into the facility without oversight. At first, I couldn’t believe it. But as he provided more background, I started to understand his perspective on the Delonis Center. His recovery relied heavily on his surroundings and support network. Having lost many friendships to stay committed to my own journey of sobriety, I could relate deeply to his concerns.

“Recently, I was in the County Jail.” The reason wasn’t volunteered, and I didn’t ask. “Now they got methadone in County Jail.” Foolishly, I confused this with Narcan, which caused some confusion during our conversation, but he helped me out. “You might as well just go ahead and let’m bring heroin on in—cause they just be as high as a kite…”

I’m picturing the only jail cell I’ve ever been in—at the Antrim County Sheriff’s Office in Bellaire, MI—where I was held and booked after my car was impounded for expired tags (of all things).

“They’re touching the flow, they’re scratching their arms. They’re in La La Land. They feel good.”

I was reminded of a time I was surprise mega-dosed, ended up catatonic in a hospital bed with cops wrestling me for my phone to find the dealer. I won that match.

“So basically… instead of givin’m gin, you’re givin’m vodka—they’re selling drugs.”

The Alcohol and Drug Foundation (ADF) reports that factors such as size, weight, health, dosage, and environment influence methadone’s effectiveness. Furthermore, consistent use can lead to addiction. The literature also indicates that methadone is often chosen for the convenience of caregivers, as it is “more easily managed than heroin withdrawal.” As a result, individuals who repeatedly enter the criminal justice system may remain addicted due to overreliance on methadone or may experience overdose from inadequate supervision.

At some point in our conversation, he started telling me a story about when he lived in Boston during the Occupy movement—specifically, the occupation of the State House—placing it in late 2011 to early 2012.

“Then they moved in,” he says. “At the time, I was hustling the South Station… Here they come with alcohol—they come to fight. Somebody got stabbed… Philadelphia got shut down because a woman got raped—” His image of the movement had nothing to do with the philosophy of it, but everything to do with how the movement began to mutate. 

“So now I felt… you’re move’n in on my turf. You talking about occupy—you occupy something because you’re too lazy to get up and get yours! So now, me’n you got a problem because it’s one hustler versus another.”

Speaking of Wall Street—

I don’t think he intended to draw a correlation between the instinct for violence and laziness (again, this is stream-of-consciousness). Still, the words of Peter Brook, one of the most visionary theatre directors, were buried in his sentiment: “To be violent is the ultimate laziness. War always seems a great effort, but it is the easy way.”

“You know, if you really came to...to Ann Arbor Transit,” 

And we’re back. 

“And you was walking around, and you were trying to liberate people; doin’ that, that’s one thing. If you were liberating, I ain't got nothing to say.” 

For Larzell, housing, sobriety, mental health— it was all about liberation. His philosophy shone through his anecdotal paraphrasing: the liberation theology in the Christian message says that there is special significance for the poor and homeless. Further explaining his ‘God bless’ and strong ‘right vs wrong’ point of view.  

 “As soon as you get into my conversation and ask this man for $5 while I'm trying to get $5 from’m, now you're my competition. Yeah, so, you know, don't come in acting like you, Mrs. political, because you want to shoot some dope? … You know, if you're gonna be political, be political. Certain things got to go out, and certain new things got to come in…that's…what liberation is.” The church bells may as well have tolled. 

I commented on some abstract art in the window and made sure I had his name spelled correctly. I turned to speak with Calka again, finding her more amenable to conversation. She suggested we go outside for the interview, and we sat on a stone retaining wall in front of the church doors. I tried to balance my laptop on my knee while sitting with my toes pointed, aiming for a flat surface.

Lindsay Calka hurriedly explained to me the dynamics of the Delonis Center as she understood them.“There is no casual way of going in and out… If you’re homeless, you can’t go to the line and get shelter. You have to get on a list to hopefully get shelter, but only after a long period of time.” She seems exhausted just talking to me about it. 

“You can’t be there unless it’s mealtime or you have an appointment. It’s not like what people think of as beds, showers, resources, and people—it’s very limited in what it can offer.” 

She said she was addressing what the typical rich white college kid assumes about homeless shelters—which is who she thought I was when I first walked in, and why she passed me off to Larzell. But then she heard our conversation, and her receptivity adjusted. 

With winter approaching, the Delonis Center is preparing for cold-weather operations, including warming centers, overnight programs, and a range of services designed to sustain individuals during Michigan’s harshest months. These efforts rely on collaboration with churches, civic organizations, and small social-service networks—essentially, anyone willing to contribute. The NOAA forecasts a severe winter for Michigan, suggesting that the homeless community will face significant challenges. Shelter demand has increased by over 40% in the past five years; 70% of guests have disabilities, and 45% are seniors. The scale of need will surpass the Center’s capacity.

“...In the wintertime,” Calka explained, “...it is just drop-in.” We’re both awkwardly perched on the cement retaining wall just outside the church doors. 

“So if you need to not freeze to death, you can go there(The Delonis Center), but… people report that the risk of being assaulted is really high (and) the risk of relapsing is really high because the amount of drug use, drug paraphernalia, and drug-related behavior is really triggering the people.” Such as Larzel, whose defensiveness about the rules he held himself to for survival was just as instructive as the words he used to defend the hegemonic expectations of bootstrap social policy. 

“I would say that one out of two people would rather risk it in the cold than go there during the wintertime, because it's so crowded.” 

Her passion for protecting vulnerable people in her community was visceral. Most people who worked at Groundcover News were in recovery or trying to be. As someone working closely with people in and out of the available provisional systems, her opinion was reasonable in light of our conversation.

We bantered about the need for more space, and she mentioned that Delonis has been preparing to build another facility, but nobody knows for sure. I said that sounded like a need being met, but her response was:

“Anything but Delonis. We want it to look like anything except the way Delonis is. Nobody wants a Delonis in Ipsy. 
It's like a stand-in word for ‘horror institution.”  

The last thing Calka said to me was, “The government refuses to make legitimate, sustainable investments into this, like acknowledging it as a problem that is going to continue. And for years, people demanded affordable, low-income public housing, and they invested in shelters. And now that there’s absolutely not enough shelter, people are saying we need shelter. And they’re like, no, we’re gonna work on housing. Shelter isn’t sustainable. And it’s like, today, people are freezing to death. So, how about right now, we make the investment—”

She packed it all into 15 words: the entire agenda of social programs aimed at helping the most vulnerable in our communities.

Weeks later, when I interviewed Nicole Adelman, Director of the Delonis Center, over Zoom, I shared my observation that the Center was trying to be all things to all people, stretching its capacity too thin. She didn’t argue the point of being over-capacity or staff being overworked. Still, her framing was that they meet everyone where they are. Without the resources to specialize as a treatment center, low-barrier shelter, or sober living space, and with compassion for those in front of them, they meet people where they are, like a remote clinic treating everything you encounter, whether you were trained for it or not. The space needed for sober rehabilitation and low-barrier housing-first policy doesn’t exist in Ann Arbor. As such, the Delonis Center seems less like an ill-fitted tool and more like a natural product of these limitations and shortcomings.

In an interview with Ryan Stanton for MLive Ann Arbor just a month earlier, Adelman acknowledged that the low-barrier entry is disliked by some but stood by it, claiming that “it(the Delonis Center) still serves as a safe space where people feel they can go.” She told me it was at the heart of their housing-first policy. 

*

Part of my effort to understand The Delonis Center was volunteering. Dawn Gemler, head of the Community Partnership & Volunteer Specialist department at Delonis, walked us through the entire facility, from top to bottom. A windowless room dense with floor-to-ceiling shelves, lined with black plastic bags, each with a name attached so they knew whose belongings were whose. A smell you pretended not to notice, but couldn’t ignore. An unconscious man is lifted onto a gurney, momentarily blocking the main doors. The EMTs talked about a movie they had just seen in the theatre.

During my volunteer training, I learned that the low-barrier status is not a judgment call based on best practices for the shelter, but a prerequisite for federal funding, which accounted for half their budget last year. As we walked down the sidewalk, away from the Center, Gemler asked me what I thought of the Center.

I said, “I think we need three more.”

*

As of the writing of this, further complications are arising for the Center with the recent introduction of an Executive Order signed on July 24, 2025, and included in a bill presented to the House by Buddy Carter on August 5 of the same year. The Ending Crime and Disorder on American Streets Executive Order has not only criminalized vagrancy but also ended support for housing-first policies, directly affecting the kind of care the Delonis Center provides. Adelman explained that their contracts with vendors and institutions rely on each entity’s interpretation of the law—and on whether they choose to hold the Center to its standards. The Center is therefore not just at the mercy of the government but also of the industries it partners with, which provide the support it needs to remain operational. 

What will happen to the vulnerable individuals dependent on these services when vagrancy is criminalized? The policy change could result in more people being forced onto the streets while the shelter struggles to meet increasing demands, landing people in jails and prisons, per Section 3, part (b), paragraph (iii). Further, according to Section 5, part c, subsections i and ii, the Delonis Center’s policy of providing drug paraphernalia could directly expose them to lawsuits from the Secretary of HUD and the Attorney General. 

In a recent article by Jennifer Ludden for NPR, she writes, “For two decades, federal funding has prioritized getting people into permanent housing and then offering them treatment. That policy is called Housing First and has long had bipartisan support.” It’s now not only illegal; it’s becoming partisan—people's lives and homes are becoming partisan. Still, community leaders are pushing back. When asked about the Executive Order signed by Donald Trump, Washtenaw County Sheriff Ayshia Dyer said, “This is a return to failed policies that criminalize poverty and treat survival as a crime.” This quote appeared in a recent article by Jordyn Pair for MLive Ann Arbor, reporting on an officer who refused to follow the policies outlined in the Executive Order.

Later in the same article discussing the Associated Press coverage out of Washington, D.C., I saw the same story playing out with heavy machinery clearing encampments near federal buildings. I was shocked, and I had to see it for myself. So I opened Google and typed “heavy machinery homeless encampment.”

Instead of D.C.—which I assumed would be at the top of the page, plastered across the news with outcries and protests—I saw:

Gardena — Denver — Van Nuys — Atlanta — Burlington

A string of videos and news clips showing heavy equipment chewing through tents and tarps. It wasn’t just the capital. It was everywhere; D.C. was only the fuse.

Why U-M Can Do More— and Why It Doesn’t

When I first started living in a car, I didn’t think I was homeless. I thought I was living fast and free — not giving a damn; I thought my grandpa’s rock ’n’ roll music was about me, the reincarnation of Jim Morrison. I thought the universe would guide me wherever I needed to go, and all I needed to do was follow the dope. But I was young and attractive, so people mostly used the dope to lure me into sex work, and that’s when I’d start running again. Eventually, everything began to disappear: money, people, belongings, hours, days, months, until I woke up a homeless addict in New Mexico, my cup of “spiritual guidance” used up.

Then the truth of my situation surfaced—plain, unadorned, and unavoidable, like a millstone quietly affixed to the back of the mind. 

I've always tended to move like water, seeking the path of least resistance. But it's a contradiction I've kept beside my obsession with confrontation. I'm drawn to the clean logic of cause and effect, while knowing we can never fully predict what's next. So when people talk about a few hundred unhoused people in Ann Arbor, I can't help but think of the university I'm writing this from. Within its walls, safe and warm, U-M houses tens of thousands of students, and I fail to see why this gap cannot be bridged.

What if, instead of merely observing this chasm, we asked our university stakeholders: What specific actions can we take today to transform this gap into a pathway of support? 

How might the institution harness its wealth of resources and intellect to construct a tangible, compassionate bridge that connects students and the unhoused? 

*

I often refer to Ann Arbor as a liberal haven. But it’s more than that, and you can feel it everywhere: the hospitals, the professors, the experts, the kids rushing to change the world before they’ve lived in it. It’s all here—the bright-eyed hope, the anxious ambition, the curated sense of purpose that follows you down State Street like an echo. And behind it all are the resources, the connections, the industries, the innovators.

The university is full of unused capacity: architects, engineers, business students, nurses, social workers, psychologists. It isn’t hard to imagine an intercollegiate civic commons, where scholarship is braided into the life of the city. Students would learn the skills they came here to learn, but also something rarer: how to care for someone other than themselves.

And while this goal isn’t new, it would be revolutionary if an entire institution, especially one like U-M, revised its identity to center community engagement. Yet whenever I talk about a community-focused university, people smile politely and retreat behind the same familiar line: “It’s not that simple.” But simplicity is not the problem.

Universities have been giving the same answer for decades about their community involvement, and in 2007, two researchers, Alan Bloomgarden and KerryAnn O’Meara, interviewed faculty at a liberal-arts college and found something telling. Even professors who wanted to work alongside their communities were pushed into what the study called a "cacophony of competing roles"—research, teaching, and community engagement pulled against each other. One professor admitted that the most meaningful work happened "in the cracks," squeezed in after institutional duties were met. The structure doesn’t know how to handle public engagement. 

Publishing in academic journals is the only form of scholarship the university knows how to reward. Citations are their currency; the more you have, the more your work seems to matter. But anyone who’s spent time in the community knows how hollow that measure can be. A paper might be cited a hundred times and change nothing about the lives unfolding a mile from campus, while a single project done with a neighborhood can alter the texture of daily life. What would scholarship look like if the people affected by the work had a say in whether it mattered? If feedback wasn’t a footnote but a metric?

*

After a series of increasingly complicated emails—trying to convey my interest and being passed back and forth between four people—I finally secured an appointment with the Ginsberg Center at the University of Michigan. The Center focuses explicitly on community engagement, and I would be meeting with Kelly Grant and Amanda Healy to discuss the university’s efforts to engage the community. It was a pleasure speaking with them, and we shared many of the same concerns about the university’s lack of incentives for community engagement, the narrow ways scholarly impact is recognized, and the broader problem of how “impact” is measured at all. Kelly Grant walked me through the growing field of Community Engaged Scholarship and highlighted that, for years, the effects of previous community projects were measured not by the community or partner organizations but by how students felt about their experience.

Healy then went into the history of the University, showing how, over time, U-M stopped behaving like a public university and began operating like a sprawling research enterprise that happened to have classes attached. That identity, born in the postwar boom, still structures how it moves today. So when I read my question to the doctoral staff at the Ginsberg Center: “The university has world-class resources: schools of nursing, public health, social work, engineering, business… and we have a few hundred unhoused residents in Ann Arbor. What structural or political barriers prevent U-M from mobilizing its existing capacity in a coordinated way? And what would it take to overcome them?”

We laughed nervously. We all knew it was the right question, and we also knew exactly why no one could answer it. Michigan is so decentralized that no single person or office has the authority to move the whole institution, even if the will existed. Amanda Healy said it plainly: fixing the problem would require a complete shift in how Michigan understands itself. Not a new program. A new identity.

In my post-interview research, I came across work by Don Chaffin, a current professor Emeritus at U-M, and Salem Elzway, a historian and Postdoctoral Fellow at Vanderbilt University, both published by the University of Michigan, that provided a timeline of U-M’s governing ideology over the last century.

After World War II, the University of Michigan was hit with a tidal wave of federal research money: Defense contracts, NIH grants, and the newly formed NSF. The shift was so massive that it quietly rewired the institution's understanding of itself. Instead of relying on tuition or the state, U-M began depending on these outside contracts, and the campus slowly reshaped around them. Labs started functioning like corporate R&D shops. Departments chased funding like revenue. And the leadership, especially the president and the constitutionally empowered Board of Regents, absorbed a simple message: funding follows profit.

What’s more telling is that the university has done this before. It is not an impossible feat. When U-M reformed its funding model in the mid-20th century, it had to fundamentally rethink how academic departments created, delivered, and captured value. Administrators redefined departments, how value was proposed, and how revenue flowed. The idea that a shift in identity is now ‘insurmountable’ is a fiction, one that the architects of the system never believed.

*

Institutional tension looks different once you’ve spent a night under an awning or in a crowded shelter. When you’ve lived outside the systems people trust to explain the world, outside the economy, the social safety nets, the tidy theories, you stop believing in the myth of institutional complexity. You start to notice how often institutions circle a problem rather than address it. And you see what gets squandered in the process: talent, money, time, the kind of human energy that could change a neighborhood in a week if someone allowed it to move.

The irony is that universities know this, at least in theory. In 2013, a national analysis by Sherril Gelmon, Catherine Jordan, and Sarena Seifer noted that colleges and universities are now “expected to play a leadership role” in addressing local problems—from public health to housing insecurity. Yet the same report identified the central impediment: institutions “do not have in place the incentives and supports needed” to make that work possible. The system rewards abstraction over application. i.e., A peer-reviewed article is treated as an accomplishment; a stable family is treated as an anecdote. The idea I’m aiming for is hardly new. It’s closer to something ancient and intuitive: What if the community itself were the classroom? What if universities, instead of elevating themselves above the cities that anchor them, allowed education to flow outward—to become porous, reciprocal, accountable?

Bloomgarden and O’Meara found that when students worked on real problems, their learning deepened. One faculty member told them, “The community teaches what the classroom can’t”— a simple sentence that cuts through decades of institutional rhetoric. And Gelmon’s team argued that effective partnerships “mobilize multiple forms of knowledge,” meaning that expertise is not a one-way export from campus to city; it is a shared construction.

But this is not how most systems operate. They move hierarchically and unevenly. They stutter and stall. They build themselves around assumptions that no longer serve them. While homelessness is often framed as a crisis of addiction, mental health, age, or poverty, the crisis underneath those—the one rarely named—is disconnection. It’s the story about how a society can forget how to care for its own.

I’ve lived inside that forgetting. I know what it feels like to be looked through, as though your existence is a flaw in someone else’s line of sight.

One researcher, Sheril Gelmon, and her colleagues interviewed liberal arts professors and described how universities tend to “treat communities as sites, not collaborators.” In that framing, the city becomes a backdrop rather than a partner, a laboratory rather than a home. Research with community partnerships often refers to this as the “gap,” the distance between institutions and the publics they claim to serve. Again, the word ‘serve’ itself embodies problematic power dynamics and underscores the need to reframe the relationship.

*

When you lose your belongings, your home, your sense of safety, and sometimes your mind, you learn how small the world actually is. You see the precision in every clean hallway, the orchestration in every hot meal, the sheer luxury embedded in everyday life. And you begin to understand how absurd it is that anyone in a city this jam-packed with resources and education has to sleep outdoors. Once you grasp the scale of what already exists—economically, logistically, intellectually—it becomes difficult not to wonder why the response remains so insufficient, or why a nation would address homelessness with an executive order that criminalizes it.

I tend to feel that we take the lanes we’ve carved for ourselves too seriously. Beyond the blatant double entendre that casts “living outside” as a natural othering, it’s how people treat the homeless—as if they are somehow out of place. And I’ve spent a long time feeling out of place. But over time, I began to notice the inversion: the people with the most resources—universities, government agencies, international foundations—are often the most stuck. They’re boxed in by bureaucracy, by their own reputations, by the fear of making the wrong move. Meanwhile, the individuals who have lost the most are the ones who still practice generosity, cooperation, and improvisation.

That is the foundation of holistic and synergistic community theory. Not a philosophy, but a practice: giving what you can, when you have it, in the direction of need. The generational work of building a community moves through people, not policies. 

And this is what universities have forgotten. The university is not the center of enlightened thought; it is a spark. Its value lies not in its height but in its heat—its capacity to ignite something beyond its walls.

*

At the end of my interview with Nicole Adelman, I opened up about when I finally found stable housing and what my survivalist mind went through in the days leading up to it. “First, it was, ‘Okay, I’m dry. Now I need food.’ Once I had food, it became, ‘Okay, now I need clean water.’ And so on.” I told her I was moving through Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs one rung at a time, because that’s how you have to move through life.

Without missing a beat, she said, “And that’s how you have to fund.” 

Works Cited

Adelman, Nicole. Interview. Conducted by Alexander Thomas Goda-Blake, Director of the Delonis Center, Zoom, Ann Arbor, MI, 2025.

Alcohol and Drug Foundation. “Methadone.” Alcohol and Drug Foundation, 2024.

Atkinson, Richard C., and William A. Blanpied. Research Universities and the U.S. Science and Technology System. Research and Occasional Paper Series, no. CSHE.5.07, Center for Studies in Higher Education, Mar. 2007.

Bloomgarden, Alan H., and KerryAnn O’Meara. “Faculty Role Integration and Community Engagement: Harmony or Cacophony?” Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, vol. 13, no. 2, Spring 2007, pp. 5–18.

Calka, Lindsay. Interview. Conducted by Alexander Thomas Goda-Blake, Groundcover News Office, Ann Arbor, MI, 2025.

Carter, Earl L. ‘Buddy’ Jr. Ending Crime and Disorder on American Streets Act. U.S. House of Representatives, 5 Aug. 2025.

Chaffin, Don B., et al. The First 50 Years of the Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan: 1955–2005. University of Michigan, 2005.

Elzway, Simon. “Pentagon Midwest: Making the Military–Industrial–Academic Complex (and Its Discontents) at the University of Michigan.” Michigan Historical Review, vol. 44, no. 1, 2018, pp. 81–108.

Gelmon, Sherril B., Catherine Jordan, and Sarena D. Seifer. “Community-Engaged Scholarship in the Academy: An Action Agenda.” Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, vol. 45, no. 4, 2013, pp. 58–66.

Gemler, Dawn. Interview. Conducted by Alexander Thomas Goda-Blake, Shelter Association of Washtenaw County, 2025.

Grant, Kelly, and Amanda Healy. Interview. Conducted by Alexander Thomas Goda-Blake, Zoom, Ginsberg Center for Community Service and Learning, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, 2025.

Ludden, Jennifer. “Major Trump Cuts Coming: Long-Term Homeless Housing on the Chopping Block.” NPR, 14 Nov. 2025, 

Stanton, Ryan. “Meet the New Shelter Director Helping Tackle Ann Arbor’s Growing Homeless Problem.” MLive, 24 Sept. 2025.

United States, Executive Office of the President. Ending Crime and Disorder on American Streets. Executive Order, 24 July 2025.

Washington, Larzell. Interview. Conducted by Alexander Thomas Goda-Blake, Bethlehem United Church of Christ, Ann Arbor, 2025.