Erik Howard

Photographer, Community Activist

Panelist - 10:30am, Thursday, April 7th – The Power of Race in Placemaking and Community Development

Erik Howard is a photographer as well as co-founder of Expressions  and  Young  Nation in southwest Detroit.  He combines his passion for youth and community  development  with his love of photography.  Using group activities such as low  riding and graffiti art as a mentoring tool, Erik has been able to reach  out to young people in the community of southwest Detroit. Erik Howard’s photography  documents his personal relationships with these youth and his interactions  in the neighborhood. They capture the excitement of young people in their process of self discovery and development with southwest  Detroit as the backdrop. Currently Erik is the director of Young Nation, which grew out of a small unfunded youth program in southwest Detroit called Expressions.  The group was founded in 2002 through an awareness of the potential of urban youth to follow the things they are most passionate in one of two directions: exploitation  and  abuse of yourself and others, or the positive development of yourself and  others.  The group began to show youth in southwest Detroit how to use the things they are passionate about–specifically lowriding, aerosol art, and media–as a means toward that positive development.  It was this combination of developmental and cultural competencies that drove the successes of the program and the eventual desire to create an organization to support such programming.  This organization is Young Nation and believes that quality, culturally and developmentally competent programs for youth can develop, grow, and flourish in urban communities with minimal and efficient investment of limited resources and  liberal investment of value created from renewable resources. Examples of limited resources are money and space and examples of renewable resources are social capital and public/shared resources.”