For nearly 8 years, DREAM has been mobilizing the metro-Detroit Muslim community alongside our local residents to revitalize our neighborhood on the Westside of the city. We've been building a beautiful, healthy community around the Muslim Center Mosque and Community Center.

By 2012, our area had been written off by city planners and funders alike, but we were determined to show that every neighborhood still had a future. Today, after almost a decade of progress—nearly $750,000 invested, rehabbed houses on several blocks, thousands of hours spent organizing, hundreds of volunteers mobilized, new green infrastructure added, and more—we’ve changed the story about what tomorrow holds for our neighborhood and others like it.

Today, we’re making a multi-year, comprehensive commitment to DREAM and to the prosperous vision of our neighborhood in 5, 10 and 20 years. We’ve just brought our first executive director onto staff and started building a full-time team so that we can make a truly transformative impact on the area surrounding the Muslim Center. That means going beyond rehabs into new home construction, finally opening businesses on our economic main street and organizing a community capable of demanding the resources it deserves.

Together, we have come this far and now, with a fierce sense of urgency, we’re asking you to embark on the next stage of this journey with us.

We’re going from a scrappy, volunteer-led nonprofit doing good work around our neighborhood to a professionalized community development organization ready to make a transformative impact on the Westside of Detroit. Almost everything we've accomplished so far has been a labor of love by many committed volunteers. To take this next step in DREAM's development, we need all hands on deck, and your support now is more critical than ever. 

We've come a long way on this journey but we haven't reached the destination just yet. We have a vision to increase our capacity from a neighborhood revival to transformative community development organization with a professional staff ready to tackle some of the city's most pressing needs. 

Neighborhood by neighborhood, we can make a sustainable impact for individual and communities throughout Detroit. With your continued support, Dream of Detroit has the potential to combine strategic housing and land development in such a way that it can revitalize neighborhoods and build healthy communities across the city, insha'Allah. 

What your support means to us?

Thanks to the support of volunteers, partners, donors, and more, DREAM has already made a laudable impact on our neighborhood, and our work is truly molding the lives of the neighbors who’ve moved into our community. But taking our impact to the next level means deepening our roots, professionalizing our operations, and promoting our vision more broadly than ever before. We can do this if we have the resources to build a staff with the experience, expertise, and commitment to see this project through. 

How your donation makes an impact within the heart of Detroit?

Our current impact can be measured on a number of fronts: $750,000 invested; 1,500 direct service recipients; 500 volunteers touched by our work; 65 graduates of our entrepreneur training course; a transitional home for formerly incarcerated men and artist residency both active; a neighborhood association founded; moratorium on the foreclosure auction of owner-occupied homes achieved through coalition work; and more than 10 families that have moved into our neighborhood to be a part of an intentional community building effort.

Raising $100,000 right now will spur this period of strategic growth for us by funding key staff to help access more fundraising and partnership resources. 

Thank you for supporting Dream of Detroit!