Welcome to The Center for Michigan! Join us to create a statewide citizen movement to help improve our economy, fix our dysfunctional politics and provide reasoned hope that things can get better for us and our children. We need all kinds of people – Republicans, Democrats, and Independents – to work together.
It’s no secret that Michigan is facing its greatest crisis since the Great Depression. Our unemployment rate tops the nation. Many of us who are working pull down smaller paychecks than just a few years ago, while others have simply been laid off from good jobs. The automotive industry that drove our state for a century faces wrenching change.
There isn’t much that policymakers can do in the short run to help remedy these problems. But in the long run, far-seeing — even radical — public policy must be scoped to match the dimensions of the crisis we face.
So far, the response from our political leaders in Lansing has been both overwhelmingly partisan and remorselessly incremental.
Michigan is so economically damaged, our politics so splintered and our civil society so threatened that we need nothing short of a dramatic, far-reaching, broadly acceptable set of policy solutions that meet the full dimensions of the crisis we face.
Michigan needs a legislature that’s in the business of getting stuff done, of putting aside partisan or special interest affiliation for the greater good; A legislature that focuses on how – together – we can achieve a better future for all of us and for our children; A legislature that seeks out common ground to invigorate a common purpose. At a time of crisis, we need leaders with the guts and the vision to transform our economic and political landscape.
The Center for Michigan is dedicated to supporting the politics of transformation and to attracting, recruiting, informing and mobilizing citizens throughout the state who want to have a hand in meeting the challenge of our times.
Each of us has our family and personal legacies tied in this land, our own stories of happiness, triumph, achievement and the struggles of daily life. In our soft souls, each of us wants Michigan to be a state where our kids and grandkids want to live and grow and thrive, and where we can all grow a measure of self respect as Michiganders: A Michigan of beauty and innovation, of prosperity and of a future. That’s the Michigan we all want.
But today’s reality is quite different. The hour is late. The situation is dire. The challenge is profound.
Please join with us to make a better Michigan. Talk with your friends and neighbors about what we’re up to and why we all must join together to make a better Michigan.
Photo credit: Untitled by Numstead.
