LANSING, Mich. — Friday The McKenzie Patrice Croom Flint Community Lab, part of the Flint Development Center, celebrated its grand opening with a live streamed virtual event featuring lab staff and students, partners, community leaders, and funders ending with a ceremonial ribbon cutting.
The Flint Community Lab — the first community-based laboratory of its kind in the world — provides Flint residents with a resource for free water testing of lead and other pollutants. Through financial support from both philanthropic and private funders, the Flint Community Lab unifies residents around a common issue: the safety of water in their homes.
The project’s focus is to provide residents with knowledge about the safety of their water, as well as resources to help people trust that their water is safe, as thousands of pipes have been replaced in the City of Flint following the water crisis that gained national attention.
The Flint water crisis is an ongoing public health crisis that started in 2014, after the drinking water source for the city of Flint, Michigan was contaminated. In April of that year, Flint changed its water source from treated Detroit Water and Sewerage Department water to the Flint River. Officials failed to apply corrosion inhibitors to the water, resulting in lead from aging pipes leaching into the water supply. This in turn lead to extremely elevated levels of the heavy metal neurotoxin in the water, which exposed over 100,000 residents to elevated lead levels.
The city switched back to the Detroit water system on Oct. of 2015, but the full impact of the crisis will not be understood for years, if ever.
The lab will provide free water testing and resources in Flint with the goal of helping residents navigate the myriad of information they see and hear about water quality, to ensure their families' health.
Shelly Sparks, Director of the Flint Development Center, hopes that “The community lab will provide an opportunity for Flint to be a model as an innovative approach for the community to take the lead to gather data, analyze, and find solutions to our future water issues.” With the lab now fully functional, teams of students and volunteers will take and analyze water samples, survey homeowners, and provide filter, fixture and plumbing education.
Residents will receive a personalized report with the results from their tap water and have the option to meet with lab staff to review the findings. The reports will emphasize the importance and need of using filters and filter maintenance as well as helping uncover needed pipe or fixture changes within residents' homes. Ryan believes that this project’s ultimate goal is “having a lab that is based in Flint, operated by Flint residents, with the purpose of serving Flint residents that embraces the resilience of Flint residents.”
Staff at the Flint Community Lab aim to test tap water from every occupied household in Flint by the end of 2022. Testing will be free for the first three years. In addition to restoring trust, Sparks believes that the lab will also help drive prosperity on the northside of Flint.
“Our idea is to allow the community to dream again and believe in a community that is safe,” Sparks said. “What we are doing here really brings more opportunities for our youth. It helps the kids to dream. Maybe they become a chemist or water advocate and then they become advocates for the city. That’s the dream for the whole city.”
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