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

Community Tech Consultants

What are Community Tech Consultants?

Community Tech Consultants do research and 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, and offered at no-cost to businesses.

  1. Schedule Online. Book an initial appointment with:
    • Martina / Donovan at Live6 Alliance
    • Additional consultants to be hired soon at Jefferson East, Inc.
  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 issues 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. Community Tech Consultants are consultants who will also do research, advise you, and help you implement.

The Back Story on this 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 Workers 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. In the 2.0 expansion to Live6, the program was renamed Community Tech Consultants to better represent the research and advisory role that CTCs offer in addition to their implementation support.

Headshot of Donovan Brown

Donovan Brown

community tech consultant, LIVE6 ALLIANCE

Over the past 10 years, I’ve worked with local shops, service providers, creatives, and nonprofits—people who just want their tech to work without the hassle. I speak your language (not just tech jargon) and make sure you feel supported every step of the way. I’m passionate about helping local businesses thrive—because when our small businesses succeed, our whole community grows stronger.

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