Filmmakers of the documentary "Gaining Ground" wanted perspective while making the final edits for their production. In Detroit, they found just that.
 
Detroit residents from community groups and foundations to education and business sectors attended a screening and participated in a focus group for the documentary Oct. 18, hosted by The Skillman Foundation in association with Midtown Detroit.
 
"Detroit is an excellent microcosm for us to screen this film," said Dina de Veer of The Active Voice, a San Francisco public relations firm that held the screening on behalf of the film company, Vital Pictures.
 
The subject of the documentary is the Dudley Street Neighborhood in Boston, which filmmakers Mark Lippman and Leah Mahan previously explored in the early 1990s documentary, "Holding Ground." This award-winning film followed residents of the inner-city neighborhood Dudley Street/Roxbury as they struggled to rebuild their community in the midst of crime, abandoned homes and gentrification.
 
Now the filmmakers, working with grants from the Ford and MacArthur foundations, are revisiting the community. This time, the film examines the neighborhood's community land trust, which is an incorporated, non-profit group that acquires and manages land on behalf of residents in a community. In doing so, the trust can prohibit foreclosures and preserve affordability on houses sitting on that land.
 
"Detroit is a unique city, in that it is a city that is attempting to rise from a severe economic downturn and many of its neighborhoods are struggling to maintain their existence," said de Veer when explaining why Detroit was selected as one of two screening locations. "There are also a great deal of non-profit and community organizations in the city, coupled with a whole host of foundations who are all trying to help the city return to what it once was."
 
Two focus groups participated in the Oct. 18 screening in Midtown and provided feedback through critiques, suggestions and in a question and answer session. Filmmakers plan to use this feedback, in addition to the responses from a New Orleans screening, as they make final adjustments to the film. "Gaining Ground" is slated for release in the spring of 2012.

• Watch John F. Barros, executive director of the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, deliver the keynote speech at the Kids Matter Here Neighborhood Summit in January 2008.

-- Lonie Haynes, a native of Atlanta, is a Communications Fellow at the Foundation, and a member of the National Urban Fellow class of 2012.