A new food co-op opened June 8 in Detroit’s Brightmoor neighborhood, which struggles to meet the demand for affordable and healthy food options.
In the city of Detroit, three in four residents have food access challenges due to limited income grocery stores and transportation. The Abbott Resource Center Food Co-op, located at 20740 Grand River, will provide more options to Brightmoor residents, one-fifth of whom live below the poverty line, according to U.S. Census data.
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The center was made possible with the aid of a $500,000 grant from the Priority Health Total Health Foundation, formed in 2020 to improve Detroiters’ health by investing in organizations serving the community. The foundation issued the grant to Brightmoor Connection Food Pantry, a nonprofit founded in 2008 that feeds approximately 3,000 Brightmoor families annually. After nearly two decades of renting a building for all of the nonprofit’s work, the grant made it possible for Brightmoor Connection to purchase its own building with transitional housing upstairs for at least nine mothers with young children as well as community space with communal computers, and a 2,500-square-foot grocery store with affordable food prices, cooperatively owned by the community.
“The goal is to keep the prices down but make food access available to address the high commodities, because when you’re shopping for your food from gas stations, you are forced to buy processed food,” said Roslyn Bouier, executive director of the Brightmoor Connection Food Pantry. “So then we see high comorbidity: diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity.”
In Detroit, many residents rely on gas stations and dollar stores for food, which lack adequate fresh and healthy options, according to a Detroit Food Policy Council analysis. Detroit obesity rates are 17% higher than the state’s average, according to a 2022 study published in the Undergraduate Journal of Public Health. Compared to the average American, Detroiters are also 1.6 times more likely to die from heart disease and a poor diet can be a contributing factor.
Memberships to the food co-op will be offered on a sliding scale to ensure it’s accessible to everyone in the community. The co-op will be open to the public and a membership is not required to shop there.
Bouier said the project came out of wanting to ensure access to healthy food for residents at a time when a lot of development is coming to Detroit that doesn’t always happen equitably and can lead to displacement. In the fall, the city plans to implement its Brightmoor Framework Plan which focuses on vacancy, housing, parks and open space, and streetscapes.
“We need to make sure there’s still food access and community with development,” said Bouier.
In May, the city’s only other cooperatively-owned grocery store, the Detroit People’s Food Co-op, opened in the North End with similar goals of increasing equitable food access and economic development.
Approximately 40 community members were paid to help build out the center, which the nonprofit purchased in March, Bouier said.
“We’ve had people in the community come in, and we’re able to pay them because this foundation supported this vision,” she said. “They are invested in this building because this is theirs.”
Bouier had endless accolades for working with Priority Health.
“This foundation was extremely brave in stepping out…to support the community in such an open and unorthodox way,” she said. “They just gave us free autonomy to say, ‘this is what we need in our community,’ and they gave us the resources to be able to make it happen.”
The center is the third project Brightmoor Connection Food Pantry and Priority Health have partnered on. Priority Health also has invested in Brightmoor Connection’s food pantry which uses a “client-choice” model where users can make appointments to shop the food pantry in an environment that reduces the stigma associated with food pantry use.
“That is what has kept us at the table with Brightmoor,” said Shannon Wilson, executive director of the Priority Health Total Health Foundation. “The residents continue to tell us the pride they have in having an organization like this in their community, one where they get to shop just like a regular shopper, where there are foods on the shelves that represent their culture, where they know where the food is being grown.”
The group’s client-choice model is transitioning to the co-op model. The $500,000 grant will ensure Brightmoor Connection’s operation of the food co-op for at least two years, based on a feasibility study the nonprofit conducted.
“Not only are we providing food security now, but we’re also providing some economic security,” Wilson said. “We’re keeping those dollars in those neighborhoods and in those communities that need them the most, and that sense of pride is still there and beaming.”