Last Chance Mile

Industry came to Grand Rapids on the power of the Grand River, much as the Medical Mile came to the city on the shoulders of Michigan Street NE.

Throughout the reinvention of this American city, we will see how generations of Grand Rapidians, through a shared vision and a willingness to give back to the community, have survived two World Wars, the Depression and are coming out of the Great Recession.

We will also see how the Medical Mile is changing the people of Grand Rapids as they invite—or at least grudgingly accept --people of different colors, creeds, nationalities and religions or perhaps no religion at all to become their neighbors.

“Last Chance Mile: The Reinvention of an American Community” is really the story of those people. We will join the leaders of Grand Rapids as they confront the collapse of their city’s manufacturing base and work together to create this new life-science cluster of prosperity.

We will go inside Van Andel Institute, the Michigan State University College of Human Medicine, the West Michigan Science and Technology Initiative, Spectrum-Butterworth Hospital, Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital, and the Meijer Heart Center on the Mile, meeting the people who are saving lives, people whose lives have been saved, and the people who are, at street level, transforming their community.

We will meet a medical school student who grew up shoveling gravel at his family’s concrete company, along with an intern who discovered there was no better place for her family than West Michigan.

We will also meet a scientist who is building a new business on four feet of laboratory bench space, the researchers who are working on cures for cancer and neurological diseases, and a Grand Rapids high school student who dreams of becoming a doctor and of being the first person in her family with a high school diploma.

We will also go to the cities of Wyoming and Kalamazoo to see that the Medical Mile is more than a $1.5 billion campus on the shoulders of a little more than a mile of concrete in Grand Rapids, and we will learn that not everyone bought into the idea that they had to be on the Mile to be part of this new community.

Grand Rapidians have always had a real instinct for self-preservation. They are not strangers to reinvention. But this time they created something truly special. Medical Mile would become Michigan’s largest life sciences cluster, responsible for 46,000 direct and indirect jobs and $4.4 billion gross regional product.

We will also discover this story is far from over. The Medical Mile could still fail.

And we will see that the Medical Mile needs to be much more than that if it is to prosper, and we will also look to the future to see that Grand Rapids needs much more than the Medical Mile to become the community it needs to be in the 21st century.