11
any people enjoy eating
potato chips and drink-
ing pop, but wouldn't
consider living on them.
The story is different for
some lower-income De-
troiters who don't have
healthier food options
available in their neighborhoods.
According to Noam Kimelman, the
founding partner of Fresh Corner Cafe
in Detroit (www.freshcornercafe.com ),
an estimated 70,000 Detroit households
lack a private vehicle to go shopping
for fresh food at supermarkets in the
suburbs. While more than 100 inde-
pendent grocers of varying quality exist
in the city, the default choice for some
Detroiters is eating fast food or cheap
snack items from corner party stores
and gas stations.
With his business, Kimelman is
changing the bleak picture by bringing
high-quality food options into these
same neighborhood places. He is among
the growing wave of entrepreneurs,
innovators, gardeners, funders, and all
manner of volunteers and professional
staff, who are working to achieve food
justice and help Detroiters become
healthier.
The various food distribution and
growing projects in Detroit — some-
times in collaboration with one an-
other — represent a network of hope
for bringing about positive changes in
a city that continues to reimagine itself.
Perhaps, one day Detroit will lose its
dubious title of "No. 1 in the United
States for potato chip consumption," as
Kimelman once said.
Kimelman of Detroit, a member
of Isaac Agree Downtown Synagogue
(IADS), holds a master's degree in
health policy from the University of
Michigan. A Boston native, he de-
cided to pursue improving nutrition
for the poor after participating as an
undergraduate in a national fellowship
program through the U-M School of
Public Health.
"I was placed at Henry Ford Hospital
in Detroit and quickly learned that I
didn't have to go very far to find egre-
gious disparity and poverty," he said. All
the meanwhile, I was watching a health
system spend hundreds of millions of
dollars treating disease, but spending
very little on preventing disease. It felt
backward."
In his senior year, Kimelman started
a nonprofit called the Ypsilanti Health
Initiative (YHI), which paired college
students with senior citizens living in
Ypsilanti.
"They would meet once a week, eat
a nutritious lunch together, engage in
a health workshop and go shopping
together at the Ypsilanti Food Co-op,
where they got half-off their groceries,"
Kimelman said.
The experience taught him about
starting an organization from scratch
and working with a diverse group of
stakeholders. He also became convinced
that "nutrition, education and exercise
were the answers to our health crisis,
not liposuction or heart surgery?'
www.redthreadmagazine.com
Fresh Corner Cafe, offering fresh food
delivery and a catering service, was
formed "in response to the troubling
lack of access to high-quality healthy
foods in Detroit," said Kimelman, who
recently received the 2014 Young Entre-
preneur Award from SCORE, a national
organization that aids small businesses.
"We pay acute attention to the nutri-
tional density of our ingredients as well
as where they come from, how they are
produced and who benefits along the
way," he said. The result is a "well-bal-
anced and delicious menu that maxi-
mizes what is fresh, healthy, sustainable
and affordable?'
Peaches & Greens Produce Mar-
ket (www.peachesandgreens.org) and
Lunchtime Detroit (www.
getmelunchtime.com), both near De-
troit's New Center, provide most of the
meal preparation.
"We sell about 20-30 healthy meals
per week per corner store and generate
$8,000 a month in sales through that
channel," Kimelman said.
"We can make
it easier to
access healthy
food."
The Fisher Foundation has invested
in a range of programs in Brightmoor,
whose local partner, City Mission,
seeks to break the cycle of generational
poverty through education, mentoring
relationships and outreach programs for
at-risk children. The charitable Mandell
L. and Madeleine H. Berman Founda-
tion and the Jewish Fund are other
donors.
COMMUNITY GARDENS
MANY ACCOLADES
Various partners have helped Fresh
Corner Cafe with its operations and
aspirations. As a fledgling business,
Kimelman was awarded the micro-grant
contributions collected from a Detroit
Soup dinner in 2010. He used the funds
for in-store demos and sampling to
engage customers at the party stores
and gas stations. He got a subsidized,
low-interest loan to buy a refrigerated
truck from Detroit Micro-Enterprise
Fund, which assists small businesses in
their initial stage of development as well
as established businesses.
Fresh Corner Cafe won the People's
Choice Award two years ago at Detroit
Harmonie's Get Funded Challenge. In
June 2013, the company placed first in
the Emerging Company Category of the
Pure Michigan Social Entrepreneurship
Challenge.
Another venture for Kimelman is the
Detroit Food Academy he founded in
2011. The experiential leadership devel-
opment program (www.
detroitfoodacademy.com) is dedicated to
transforming the lives of young Detroi-
ters through food and social entrepre-
neurship.
"We can make it easier to access
healthy food," he said, "but the crush-
ing stresses of poverty make it difficult
to bypass immediate gratification in
exchange for future best interest."
The Max M. & Marjorie S. Fisher
Foundation, with a mission to enrich
humanity by strengthening and em-
powering children and families in need,
has provided funding to organizations
bringing healthy food to Detroiters, such
as a grant in January for Fresh Corner
Cafe's expansion into Brightmoor, a
roughly four-square-mile neighborhood
near the northwest border of Detroit.
A cleanup and the introduction of gar-
dens, a greenhouse and street artwork
are brightening life for residents of the
low-income neighborhood.
A highlight of the community (www
neighborsbuildingbrightmoor.org) is
cheery Brightmoor Youth Garden on
Grayfield Street, just south of Fenkell
(Five Mile). Under garden co-directors
Riet Schumack and Carol Hawke, chil-
dren ages 9 18 learn to grow and harvest
vegetables. They share profits from
market sales.
"Marjorie Fisher has been a great ben-
eficiary and champion of urban farming,
and made the greenhouse possible,"
said Schumack, who has spoken about
agriculture to Jewish groups brought to
tour Brightmoor. They included Israeli
visitors from the Jewish Federation's
Partnership2Gether Region.
The Fisher Foundation also donated
funds to assist an east side Detroit com-
munity garden created from three va-
cant lots on Glenfield Street, off Gratiot.
A grant from the Jewish Women's
Foundation of Metro Detroit through
the Isaac Agree Downtown Synagogue
enabled the start of what former Detroi-
ter and congregant Blair Nosan called
"a faith-based farm in Eden Gardens?'
Nosan was looking for a growing rela-
tionship between this predominantly
African-American community and
TADS. Planning the project with Chava
Knox, an IADS member from the neigh-
borhood, Nosan said they "saw this work
as one small effort to repair relationships
long-ago abandoned in our region:'
IADS has adopted Eden Gardens,
now in its second summer, as "a place to
make a difference in food and justice,"
Knox said. Interested synagogue mem-
bers get their hands dirty in the garden
from 5-9 p.m. Tuesdays.
Eden Gardens "is a place for the
youth to express themselves while also
building a relationship with the elders
through planting and learning new life
skills," Knox said. "We aim to address
obesity and diabetes in our community
by growing our own food and choosing
healthy eating habits?'
Workers at the garden get to take
home bundles of nourishing food for
-
their families, she said, ticking off a list
of crops that includes black-eyed peas,
cabbage, butternut squash, squash, bush
beans, kale, tomatoes, spinach, sweet
potatoes, carrots, arugula, radishes,
beets, parsley, basil and jalapeno pep-
pers.
Eden Gardens wants to start a farm
stand because more than enough food
is being harvested. Leaders also hope to
build a community house, for teaching
children about nutrition, plus cooking,
sewing, farming and canning classes.
Such education is up the alley of Eitan
Sussman's Keep Growing Detroit (www.
detroitagriculture.net), which takes a
collaborative, "think globally/act locally"
approach to achieving food sovereignty
in Detroit. KGD is a member of the
Garden Resource Program Collabora-
tive, a network of more than 1,400 local
farms and gardens receiving the sup-
port of hundreds of community-based
organizations and residents. Earlier this
month, KGD presented its annual bus
and bike tour to see what's growing.
"For a decade, our own Garden Re-
source Program has supported family,
community, school and market gardens
in Detroit, Highland Park and Ham-
tramck," said Sussman, noting that
participants receive seeds and young
vegetable plants grown at Keep Growing
Detroit's farm, the Plum Street Market
Garden, as well as in partnership with
Earthworks Urban Farm.
"Hands-on demonstrations come with
the plant materials because "we want
(the gardeners) to be successful," he said.
KGD can direct gardeners to neigh-
borhood-based tool banks and retail
outlets, and resource centers, such as
Jeff Klein and Andy Ray's Detroit Farm
and Garden. It carries commercial com-
post and quality gardening, farming and
landscape items.
ON THE HORIZON
Many additional organizations and indi-
viduals are involved in the food move-
ment through organizing, advocacy and
education.
When it comes to bringing afford-
able, healthy food to corner stores, Fresh
Corner Cafe has relied on catering at
Midtown and Downtown cafes to subsi-
dize its core work.
The company's newest offering, the
Self-Serve Workplace Cafe service, may
be the best solution to generating rev-
enue streams, according to Kimelman.
The honor-based, fresh vending concept
allows customers to purchase prepack-
aged healthy meals with the swipe of a
credit card.
Kimelman also sees its value to "en-
sure a strong connection between the
workplace and its corollary corner store,
so that employees know that every time
they purchase a salad at their office,
they are directly helping a lower-income
Detroiter purchase that same salad at a
reduced price.
"Every time they nourish themselves,
they enable someone less fortunate to
nourish themselves, too," he said. RT
RED THREAD I September 2014 43