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Plus, our food sovereignty webinar is tomorrow evening
I am just back from a three-and-a-half day visit to Detroit.
The first two days focused on a conference about regenerative agriculture presented by the Clinton Global Initiative and The Henry Ford non-profit, and there will be articles to come about that.
On Friday and again on Saturday morning, I segued to a return visit to Eastern Market Detroit, the historic and monumental public market and wholesale distribution center that is the hub for a sprawling community of food-related businesses and producers. Thanks to the generous guidance and assistance of longtime Eastern Market CEO Dan Carmody, I will have multiple inspiring stories to tell.
But first, since food co-ops have been in the news in our home base of Chicago, Dan (at my request) took us by one of the biggest recent food developments in his city: the Detroit People’s Food Co-op at 8324 Woodward Ave. in the city’s North End neighborhood, which opened on May 1.
Like the recently opened co-op projects in Chicagoland (FOODshed in Woodstock and Wild Onion Market in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood) and those under development (Prairie Food Co-op in suburban Lombard and Chicago Market in the city’s Uptown neighborhood), Detroit People’s Food Co-op took many years — 14, to be specific — to raise the resources need to open the store.
Like other co-ops, the Detroit store exudes a better-for-people-and-the-planet ethos.
But there are some significant differences.
First, Detroit People’s Food Co-op is quite a bit bigger than most, its spacious 15,000 square feet giving it the feel of a small but full-service supermarket.
While many co-op markets focus intensely on local and/or sustainably produced products, Detroit People’s Food Co-op focuses on being a one-stop shop and community center for local residents.
The North End, where the vast majority of residents are Black, was greatly affected by the city’s decades of economic decline. Although the neighborhood’s proximity to the city center has enabled it to benefit from Detroit’s remarkable rebound over the past decade, the co-op addresses a residual scarcity of full-scale grocery stores in the community.
“We intended for this to be like any grocery store, you can go in and shop for everything on your list …,” said General Manager Akil Kasai Talley. “We wanted it to be full-service, walk in and you could get anything from laundry detergent, feminine hygiene products. And the local piece is what kind of sets us apart from everybody.”
And the Detroit People’s Food Co-op is just part of Detroit Food Commons, a much larger economic and community development project built under the leadership of food justice pioneer Malik Yakini during his long tenure as executive director of the non-profit Detroit Black Community Food Sovereignty Network.
The upper level of the two-story building contains four commercial kitchens where start-up food entrepreneurs and culinary artists can refine their skills and products, a banquet hall and an office center. “So this project is a lot more grand than the typical co-op,” said Akil, who pegged the total cost of the project at $22 million.
The lifetime cost of an ownership share in the market is $200, paid lump sum or at $20/month for 10 months, and as in nearly all co-ops provides owners with a say in how the store is run. An intense social media-driven campaign over the six weeks prior to the store’s opening boosted the number of owners to more than 3,800, from around 2,500.
Nonetheless, receipts from owners make of just a small percentage of the project’s budget. Akil said the store raised the remaining millions from a variety of sources, and highlighted Develop Detroit — a real estate development non-profit company that mainly specializes in affordable and mixed-income housing — as a leading partner.
Asked for an early reading on customer traffic, Akil gave it a thumbs up. The store, he said, has averaged 1,600 customers a day and exceeds the pre-opening sales forecasts by 40 percent.
One other major difference between the Detroit People’s Food Co-op and other co-ops, well, anywhere, is in the photo above of a sign near the store’s entrance. “Whaddupdoe” is a variation of “what’s up,” and it developed into a greeting (sometimes compared to “aloha” in Hawaii) that also functions as a local sense of place. It is kind of a code word to identify that Detroit is your home (and I admit I had to Google it to find that out).
So with a whaddupdoe shout-out, Local Food Forum wishes great success to the Detroit People’s Food Co-op and its community.
If you are inspired by the story above about the efforts to increase healthy food access and food sovereignty in Detroit, I hope you will join co-host Chef Sarah Stegner of Prairie Grass Cafe and me TOMORROW (June 17) at 7 p.m. central to learn more about similar efforts that are going on in Chicago.
The free webinar is titled "Gardens in a City: Cultivating Hope in Chicago.” Our three guests are everyday heroes who are seeking to revitalize Chicago's underserved and under-resourced by people of color growing in community gardens and urban farms.
These small growing projects are helping restore hope, jobs and opportunity to challenged communities, while helping residents who face food insecurity to feed themselves — as Chicago manifests what has become a powerful national movement under the banner of food sovereignty.
The program will focus on the work of Community Food Navigator, a Chicago non-profit launched in 2020. Its focus is on providing tools and resources to help people of color in underserved areas produce food for themselves and their communities — the core of the concept known as food sovereignty.
Our featured guest is Nick Davis, managing director of Community Food Navigator. As Nick told Local Food Forum for an article published earlier this year, “The purpose of the Community Food Navigator is really to build power amongst growers of color, build connections and relationships in our food system, and coordinate our food system a little bit better.”
He continued, “It's important that the community has a sense of how other people, block by block and neighborhood by neighborhood and then the region, define that for themselves, and how we can start to organize and convene people and tighten up our relational networks so that we can actually move towards those definitions of visions of food sovereignty.”
Nick will be joined by these other leaders in the urban growing community that are aligned with Community Food Navigator's work.
Angela Taylor, whose work focuses on bringing the benefits of hyper-locally produced food to underserved communities on Chicago's West Side through her work as wellness coordinator at the Garfield Park Community Council.
Natasha Nicholes, a dynamic change-maker as founder and executive director of the We Sow. We Grow. urban farm in the West Pullman neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side.
Please join us to learn more about these important efforts.