Working for Michigan...and You!

What We Do
The Michigan Land Use Institute works with citizens, officials, and other organizations to build a prosperous new economy in Michigan, one that expands opportunity by improving our health and environment. Specifically, we promote people-friendly, regional planning; healthy food from local farms; and Michigan's leadership in the new green-energy and clean-water economy.

These strategies save people money and build local economies. With them, we can make Michigan, once again, a great place to live, work, and call home.

Getting there, however, requires new ideas for new situations. That's what MLUI provides. We keep the majority's vision in front of decision makers. And we work with people and communities to raise their voices, make their points, and see their way through to a better solution.

•  Thriving Communities:
  We represented thousands of northwest Michigan residents in a successful legal battle against a planned highway through a quiet, undisturbed river valley. Now we work shoulder to shoulder with our former opponents on details of a new, regional development plan that 15,000 area residents helped craft. This Grand Vision plan calls for strong town centers, wide open spaces, and transportation systems that reduce traffic while increasing everyone's ability to get around.
  
  Four Grand Traverse-area county bus systems are searching for ways to not only serve their own commuters but also link their routes to provide quality regional service. This groundbreaking development followed a number of MLUI-backed efforts that pointed the way, particularly bus service in Benzie County and the Grand Vision regional citizen-planning project.
  
  
•  Food and Farming:
  We've built a local-food marketing campaign that more than 70 percent of participating farms say increases their sales, and encouraged farm-to-school programs that have kids eating healthier food—five times as many apples, for example. In turn, major northwest Michigan health care and human service agencies are reaching out to MLUI for help promoting local food as part of building public health.
  
  We’re also working at the other end of the local food supply chain, with growers. We conduct workshops that show aspiring and veteran farmers how to get started, finance and buy land and equipment, modify or expand their operation and growing season, add value to their products before they leave the farm, and become good marketers. And we helped form the Food and Farming Network, a group of growers, processors, distributors, retailers, bankers, and other business people that want to accelerate the growth of a local food economy in northwest Lower Michigan.
  
  
•  Energy and Environment:
  In 2007, Michigan became Ground Zero for the national coal rush—a push by coal companies and utilities to build 150 new coal-fired power plants in America. Michigan faced its own coal rush—proposals for eight new plants in a state with sharply falling electricity demand—so we linked with environmental and citizen groups to help point the state away from new coal and toward a jobs-rich clean energy future. Starting in 2007, we focused our advocacy journalism on the coal rush and alternatives to it, providing the state’s most extensive and in-depth coverage of both.
  
  Support is growing in Michigan for public trust protection of Great Lakes water due in large part to MLUI's valuable communications and community organizing services. We are bringing strategic thinkers together from across the state, working with allies in Washington, and collaborating with enlightened state lawmakers to make sure companies do not exploit our fresh water resources for profit.