David McCarthy, an Eastside resident since 2014, is the Generational Programs Manager, responsible for overseeing Youth Service Corps, Take Root Garden Club, and Senior Discovery Group. He brings to ANC more than a decade of experience in arts-based community organizing, including as the founder and principal janitor of the New Music and Arts Forum, a mutual-aid society devoted to experimentalism across the arts in partnership with the Turner-Dodge House (Lansing Parks and Recreation). In his previous position as the inaugural director of the Michigan State University Arts Living-Learning Community, an undergraduate program devoted to socially engaged art, he coordinated numerous community-based arts projects, including a partnership between MSU faculty and students, guest artists, and incarcerated youth at the Ingham County Youth Center, Lansing’s juvenile detention facility.

He loves Lansing’s Eastside, where his neighbors include his mother, a brother and a sister-in-law, four nephews, and a niece. A practicing multi-instrumentalist and songwriter, he is currently writing a book about early efforts to create a distinctly Black form of mass media entertainment out of African American nightclub entertainments in the midst of racial integration between 1965 and 1975, with a particular focus on Black-owned nightclubs and record companies in Western Michigan. When he is not at work or in a library, he can often be found in Hunter Park, especially when his beloved public pool is open.