News About Us

Welcome to our village!

Thank you for joining us here at our website.  We are so grateful to be here online,  after months of repairs and redesign in 2015.  It has been a tumultuous four years for us, beginning with the death of our founder, Gary Custer, in January 2015, and the crash of our old site soon thereafter.  But here we still are, brighter, committed and in what Gary used to call the “East Village state of mind.” That means we’re feisty as ever and devoted to giving you news and great writing generated by volunteer citizen journalists about neighborhoods, the kind of city that sustains neighborhoods, and the things you need to know to be informed participants in our world together.

Our home is Flint, Michigan – we began in a neighborhood east of downtown. Over the past four years our city has been rocked by a water crisis that should not have happened and has dominated almost every other Flint story. We have wrestled with documenting that story.  But we also have been trying to capture Flint’s other stories — all interconnected, many heart-wrenching, many suggesting evidence of resilience in struggle, all part of the truths of an American town both representative of iconic stories and yet inimitably idiosyncratic and often surprising.

We also live, observe, write, and  celebrate in a larger world.  After all, as Gary noted, “We all live east of somewhere.”  So, wherever you’re hailing from, we welcome you to our version of an electronic village.

We are still creating content and adding features, so come back and visit us often. Much more is on the way.

Abundant thanks to our tech guru, Dean Paxton, for this web design, and thanks to Edwin D. Custer for the design – since 1976 – of our EVM logo.  It’s a beautiful tree — which you will see on many of our old streets — and a house, a symbol to us of community and grace.