Detroit Movement Center is an experimental collaborative of justice-aligned practitioners designing training and practices to empower community members who seek to cultivate new strength, stability, and alignment through energetic embodiment and healing modalities, like yoga, dance, somatic movement, guided meditation, restorative massage, pilates, theatre, and much more. Beginning in 2025 with our Community Yoga Practice, in partnership with HotFlowerYoga, we developed a space to connect teachers and trainers with students and community members who wanted to possibly explore their leadership and advocacy skills beginning with the work of embodied empowerment and restoration. In this same year, we hired a coordinator, Morgan Hutson,  with an extensive and well-known background in music, dance, healing justice work, and creative direction. Under her leadership the project continues to grow, adding promotional capacity for beloved movement teachers, improving access to classes and learning spaces and to design inventive and audacious programming. 

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EMEAC’s Social Ecologies Porject is an initiative to build a move healthy and holistic social movement for environmental justice as a broad, ecologically whole, well-integrated vision of social, economic, and climate justice. Our pillars are:

• Environmental Justice to transform production from extractive and destructive, to regenerative and creative;
• Democratic Organizing to transform how power is formed from something exclusive to elite classes to something inclusive of the common people;
• Economic Democracy to transform value creation from being solely profit driven toward something focused on the common good;
• Ecological Restoration to sustain, protect, and dignify the livable places on the planet for all creatures and life;
• Intersectionality and Just Relations to restore our innate tendency toward love and respect for one another.
  

Through the Social Ecologies Project, we build on our education and arts & culture programs to develop leadership within our community, preparing ourselves for collective self-advocacy in a way that centers our ecosystems, those social and natural. Over the past 6 years, EMEAC has led in election protection and political education work as well as in-school environmental education programming. 

• Our work is to sustain community centered programming in the following key areas
  • Arts and Culture
  • Popular Political Education
  • Entrepreneurship and community-based business development 
  • Youth leadership development 
• The foundation of a healthy and deeply alive political movement is one in which the operation of all campaigns and projects is rooted in a fundamental interdependence and interconnectedness; this is the need for the social ecology, the multiplication of skills and assets among diverse locations of community and neighborhood power and energy 
• The Urban Ecologies Project is a central installation of the concept of the Social Ecologies model which implements resourcing and capacity-building projects in communities and neighborhoods which are deeply impacted by the concentrated offloading of environmentally degrading industrial byproducts and the impacts of highly concentrated human activity and life, to help these communities and neighbors to resist bad policy, survive the impacts of bad policy and develop the capacity to build and sustain new models for governance and renewed, regenerative ways of living  
• Presently this build on our Schools for Environmental Justice Programs and our Youth Initiative in Education and Leadership Development

Through the Social Ecologies Project, we build on our community health and wellness, political education and arts & culture programs to develop leadership within our community, preparing ourselves for ongoing collective self-advocacy in a way that centers and produces justice in alignment with our ecosystems, those social and natural.

Sign up to tap into our Community Advisory Consultation Processes, to learn about our constituent organizations, to get involved in more environmental justice work and environmental action, and to get help with issues in your community.

EMEAC are proud members of the Water Equals Life (WEL) Coalition. 

We have joined several other community organizations and advocates to fight for water affordability now.

Our current advocacy work includes fighting for policy in the Michigan Legislature which will: 

• Ensure Universal Access: Guarantee that every individual has access to clean, safe, and affordable water;
• Implement Income-Based Rates: Mandate that water systems apply income-based rates to eligible customers capped at 3% of income, making certain that everyone pays a bill they can afford, including tenants;
• Restrict Water Shutoffs: Limit instances in which water utilities can disconnect a customer’s water service;
• Facilitate Debt Forgiveness: Provide a process for customers to receive forgiveness of their water debt

Click this link to learn more about the WEL Coalition and our vital work for water justice in Michigan. 

We need a metabolic shift to fix the metabolic rift.

Whether guiding conservation projects, practicing citizen science in our local parks, or installing solar in a community garden, we use ecology training to build skills and confidence in our community members and partners to be well-equipped and -educated advocates for our ecosystems. 

Through our composting trainings for example, we build a practice understanding of the powerful potential in composting to reduce harmful waste accumulation. We don’t want or need any expanded landfills. We don’t need corporate controlled waste management. We need community-controlled, regenerative bio-waste management.

To begin to build our confidence as the community that is seeking to be empowered and lead in our own solutions we need to continue to grow our skills and spread education amongst one another.

Join EMEAC and Sustainable Community Farms for a 4-week intensive composting school where you will learn about how to compost starting in your home and how to properly produce highly nutritious compost no matter where you live or how much space you have!