Jacob Lewkow for Crain's
"What we've always focused on is that full story, the good and the bad, the old and the new, and now that's even more necessary than ever."
Jeanette Pierce, 37
Founder and Executive Director, Detroit Experience Factory
Annalise Frank
As lifelong Detroit resident Jeanette Pierce readies to stop leading her 12-year-old nonprofit, the past is present.
The 37-year-old's Detroit Experience Factory sends locals and visitors out on guided missions to learn the city's good and bad truths. As its goals change, Pierce is leaving her executive director role this fall to start a new sister initiative called City Institute, doling out lessons learned to other urban storytellers. She'll remain a DXF adviser.
Pierce left her day job in 2008 to run her tour and resource provider full time, without experience as an entrepreneur. It's led 110,000 on tours and grown to a budget of $750,000.
"She laid a foundation, and also did a lot of the hard and dirty work people didn't want to do," said friend and colleague Marlowe Stoudamire. "She was the real first tourism attraction for the Detroit rebirth."
A big part of Pierce's job was walking around the city and living in it — collecting experiential data to share.
She strolls past a long-closed door downtown that's now open, spewing dust, and learns a new restaurant is coming. Her apartment at the Hemmeter Building in Harmonie Park was once burglarized; someone busted an 18- by 24-inch hole in her drywall and stole a Gatorade bottle full of change.
"What really stood out at the beginning that's still important now is the word 'I,'" Pierce said. "I live here. I've always lived here ... It was super powerful that (it) was my personal experience."
Reflection is part of the gig. Detroit's more positive dialogue is pervasive now, and that means pivoting DXF toward lesser-known neighborhood stories. But misinformation rages on.
"... What's newer is that there are people ... that think that Detroit is perfect," she said. "What we've always focused on is that full story, the good and the bad, the old and the new, and now that's even more necessary than ever. If you don't understand the challenges of the city or the people who have stayed throughout everything, then it's just as detrimental as thinking everything's awful."