Startup Success Stories

Building A Dream Factory

Joyce Johnson was a Grand Rapids Central High School student who was working part-time at Saint Mary’s Hospital earning close to $12 an hour, setting up and breaking down patient rooms because of what she learned in her classes inside the Grand Valley State University Cook-DeVos Center for Health Sciences on Grand Rapids’ Medical Mile.

  Planning to go to Grand Valley State University to study pre-med, Joyce — her friends call her J.J. — was also looking forward to shadowing a 4th or 5th year MSU College of Human Medicine student a fewer hours after we met in her classroom

  J.J. was also going to be the first person in her family to graduate from high school.

  Purpose and confidence shined through the eyes of this African American teenager as she told me her plans for life and asked, “What motivates you?”

  My answer didn’t come close to matching hers.

   J.J. watched her uncle’s wife, April, die of cancer in 2005, “…my heart was falling to pieces. “This was so unbearable,” J.J. wrote in her application to become part of the Kent Intermediate School District program on Medical Mile. “I still haven’t gotten over the fact that I couldn’t help at all.”

  “Eli” is one of J.J’s classmates.  He hated school and didn’t plan to ever again sit in a classroom after high school. But a librarian suggested that Eli get involved in architectural engineering. That led him to the KISD Health, Science and Technology program at Grand Rapids Central High.

 “It became a dream and then a goal for me,” Eli wrote in his application. “Look at me now.”

   Eli, J.J. and their classmates were building a foundation in physics and chemistry. They also learn how to do bedside care, diagnostic testing and a blood draw. The idea was to give them a 360-degree view of health care.

  “It is important for kids not to just understand theory. They need to understand relevant application,” said Kent Intermediate School District Director of Career Readiness Jarrad Grandy. “That is why they get the lab time, and beyond that they get into a work-based environment in the labs, with the scientists.”

     J.J. and Eli were not only getting practical, hands-on lab experience, and a top-notch health sciences education, they were also earning college credits.

  When it is all said and done they could have 12-to-14 transcripted college credits, not articulated, at no-cost.

  Grandy and I met in the lobby of the GVSU-CHS building, surrounded by high school and college students on their lunch hour, each competing to be heard over the other in a cacophony of voices that is an expression of the energy radiating inside this five-story building that is one of the anchors of the Medical Mile.

   The GVSU Cook-DeVos Center for Health Sciences is a dream factory. High school students, college undergraduates and grad students, scientists, researchers, entrepreneurs are all mixing, mingling, learning and dreaming together.

This is an excerpt from the book, Last Chance Mile: The Reinvention of an American Community. It tells the story of how the people of Grand Rapids changed the way the world sees their community, and the way they see the world, by creating a cluster of prosperity — The Medical Mile.

Rod