Posed group photo of Community Tech Consultants and Detroit and U-M partners

Community Tech Consultants

What are Community Tech Consultants?

Community Tech Consultants offer free one-on-one training to help business owners better integrate technology into their businesses, to save business owners time and money. In the initial pilot with Jefferson East, Inc. between 2021-2023, funded by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, tech workers supported 273 small businesses. In 2025, with grant funding from the National Science Foundation and in partnership with Live6 Alliance, this program has expanded to the Livernois/Six Mile area! Business owners and nonprofit leaders from metro Detroit can book as many appointments as they need to get their business’ digital needs met at no cost. We do not sell anything and you do not have to “apply” for anything—just schedule an appointment! Our CTCs are from Detroit.

Services

Our goal is to increase the digital capability among Detroit business owners. Some of our most common requests include: 

  • Update websites
  • Create social media images 
  • Automate social media posts
  • Set up automated templates in Gmail or other systems
  • Retrieve data from one of your platforms and organize it in a way you can find
  • Use DocuSign to sign loan documents
  • Add Search Engine Optimizations

How it Works

There’s no upselling. Services are grant-funded as part of the larger research project, so offered as no-charge to businesses.

  1. Schedule Online. Book an initial appointment with:
    • Danielle at Jefferson East, Inc. or
    • Martina / Donovan at Live6 Alliance (online calendar forthcoming!)
  2. Intake Meeting. In your first meeting, you will do a comprehensive diagnostic interview (kind of like the 30-point inspection from your mechanic). At the end of this interview, your CTC will collaborate with you to establish a scope of work and prioritize that work; you will then schedule a follow up meeting.
  3. Recommendations and Implementation. Before your second meeting, your CTC will do enough research to give you options about how to resolve your tech challenge and prepare recommendations for you. Depending on the complexity of the challenge, you might resolve the issue with them in that second meeting, or you might have a follow up meeting so they can develop the teaching materials you will need to handle this issue again on your own.

What The Community Tech Consultants Don’t Do
We are not an IT help desk, who can troubleshoot over the phone. We don’t do content creation for websites or social media and we don’t do routine updates to websites FOR YOU—but we will teach you how to walk through the design process to do content creation, to update your own website, or how to use free software to make effective social media, and how to read the back-end analytics to see if your posts are working.

The Back Story on the Community Tech Worker Program
In 2021, in partnership with Jefferson East, Inc., researchers and staff from the University of Michigan developed the Community Tech Worker program. Rooted in the Community Health Worker model, Community Tech Consultants aim to help Detroit small businesses bridge the digital divide, while piloting a workforce development model to move people from Detroit without college degrees into good jobs in tech-related fields. This field research is led by an interdisciplinary team with professional backgrounds in public policy, social work, computer science, community engagement, urban planning, and law.

Profile of Danielle Taylor-Basemore, Community Tech Worker

Danielle Taylor-Basemore

senior community tech consultant, jefferson east, INc.
b.a. ’24, LSA, Communications & Digital Studies

I was determined to become a CTC because I was intrigued by the center’s goal of placing job creation and economic control in the hands of community members. As someone who has observed and experienced the economic hardships of small businesses and now has the skills to combat said hurdles, being able to give back to my city in a way that utilizes my acquired skills was an opportunity too good to pass up.

Donovan Brown

Community Tech consultant

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