By 2013, Detroit had become the largest city in the U.S. to be taken over by a governor-appointed emergency financial manager, Kevin Orr, who assumed authority over city employees, budgets, ordinances, and city-owned property. Carter, like many other city residents, took issue with the way state officials handled the emergency management plan. “The city was forced to have a financial manager — even though the people voted against the financial manager,” she says. “The financial manager decided to close the schools … cut off people’s water … and put people out of their homes because of the mortgage crisis.”

Distrust following Detroit’s bankruptcy filing in 2013—combined with news about potential voting interference after the failure of 87 voting machines in Detroit in 2016, reports of voter suppression in Georgia in 2018, and growing repercussions from the repeal of key provisions in the Voting Rights Act of 2013—have left some voters concerned about the security of their vote. According to Currie, the professor and reading festival volunteer who arrived from North Carolina for graduate study over 10 years ago and never left, “One thing is we can get out there, and then just knowing that maybe my vote really, even though I voted, my vote really didn’t get counted.”

While voting for the presidential candidate is important, many underestimate how Black women will weigh their decision, especially in the primaries, in a region where economic conditions have been volatile for several decades. Focus: HOPE has been responsive to these turns by providing job training, community advocacy, support for senior citizens, and anti-racism work since 1968. Portia Roberson notes that along with significant job growth in hospitality and information technology, the biggest industries coming to the Detroit area are not the ones that have historically defined it. But experience has made it clear that a diverse economy is key to the stability of a city’s workforce. Right now, there is a boom in the construction industry in Detroit, and with that comes new opportunities for developing skills in that area.

But that possibility might change suddenly, too, and Roberson keeps that in the back of her mind. “I’m very sensitive to the idea that just as Focus: HOPE had been very much based in the automotive and manufacturing space in terms of workforce training,” she explains, “that we don’t sort of rush to construction only to end up in a very similar situation as the manufacturing automotive in that those jobs don’t exist in a couple of years.”

Detroit resident and media executive Fortman speaks of the need to hear politicians address the impact of policy on the financial well-being of Black women and their families: “In a city like Detroit, where Black women lead households more often than not, you cannot separate the term working-class from Blackness and certainly not from Black women. It is important to remember how many women are now heads of household.”

She adds, “If they are ignoring that conversation, they’re likely not going to motivate a large swath of the population that holds the purse strings in their household.”

Author AJ Williams, another native Detroiter, has plans to build a business and appreciates the flexibility that comes with new entrepreneurial opportunities. “We just legalized recreational cannabis,” she states. “So I do want equality and inclusion from the perspective of the state level for different minorities to be able to have access to make businesses in that arena. So those are kind of my things on that level.”

Likewise, Currie recognizes the impact of disparity in opportunity. “Black women are the most educated,” she says, “and we’re the ones starting the business, but we’re the ones that have the less investors or the less money. I don’t hear any conversation around that.”

Community-level concerns factor highly for those women who are socially engaged. Fortman expressed concern about the lack of serious engagement with issues that deeply affect the region: “Flint came up in both nights of the Dem debates, but it was no more than a talking point.” She adds, “We are increasingly becoming a city and nation where you can get the help you need as long as you are already in the, and I say this in quotes, ‘right class.’ We’re leaving behind — especially in a city like Detroit — children, and we’re leaving behind the elderly.”

Demonstrating care for others also is key to how Williams defines her values: “I grew up very Christian, and you know, I traveled a lot and I took world religion, and so my perspective is a little bit different, and it’s a lot more liberal. However, on the flip side, because I grew up in a predominantly African American neighborhood, I went to a predominantly African American school. I am passionate about our community like I’m passionate about African American political issues.”

Carter, who worked on the national Women’s March in Detroit, took issue with the organization’s one-size-fits-all approach to building local connections. “When they came to Detroit, we made sure that Black and Brown and Indigenous and queer and differently abled folk issues were centered. The folks in the margins’ issues were centered. We decided to caucus, and we did it on our own,” she explains. “It was hilarious because all the White women in the room were like, ‘You guys, you can’t caucus. You didn’t ask permission.’ I was like, ‘We’re not going to ask. We’re talking about things that impact us, and this large conglomerate of a national organization that has millions of dollars to do an event in our city is coming here and spending money and saying that they want to center local people and local issues, and we’re holding them accountable to all of that, and that’s our duty.’”