DETROIT – Farming is Jerry Ann Hebron’s life, and she has a vision for Detroit’s future.
“I love this,” Hebron, the executive director of the Oakland Avenue Urban Farm, said on Friday morning. “This is my happy place.”
The sprawling urban farm, which occupies the entire 9100 block of Goodwin Street between Owen and Westminster streets, grows 33 kinds of fruits and vegetables and sells them at farmers’ markets.
For years, she’s wondered what she could do to address the pervasive issue of food insecurity in Detroit.
“Can we really reduce the amount of people, families that are insecure, food insecure in Detroit?” Hebron said. “There are over 3,000 farms and gardens in the city of Detroit in schools, churches, community gardens, and firms, all of different scales.”
It’s why she’s embarking on a plan, along with a group of other urban farms, to convert a 9,000-square-foot vacant grocery store at the corner of Oakland and Westminster, into what she calls a “community resilience center.”
The center will offer a commercial kitchen space, community food storage, an event space, and affordable housing.
The group of farms along Oakland Avenue includes Cadillac Urban Gardens, Feedom Freedom Farms, and others, and they are pursuing plans to build similar community resiliency spaces throughout the city.
Hebron remembers the days when urban farming was openly mocked by skeptical members of the Detroit city government, before it became an important part of community revitalization.
“They would say, ‘I left the south. I don’t want to see corn. I don’t wanna see chickens running around,’” Hebron said. “What people fail to realize is that we all eat. That’s part of our survival.”
The farm is part of Northern Christian Community Development Corporation, which was founded by Hebron’s 94-year-old mother, the Rev. Bertha Carter, back in 2000.
It’s tended by residents, school kids, volunteers, and Hebron herself. It’s often an eye-opening experience, particularly for the kids.
“We have chickens down the street,” Hebron said. “We would take them down there to harvest the eggs. That’s when they learned that’s where the eggs came from.”
On Friday (April 24), a group of volunteers from the accounting firm Ernst & Young were outside getting dirty. Earlier this week, it was students from U of D High School, U of D-Mercy, and Michigan State University.
The latter is part of an educational program and applied research in partnership with the Michigan State Fair and MSU Extension.
The word she repeatedly used was ‘resilience,’ and Hebron says it also represents the resilience of different neighborhoods in the city that have seen farms replace abandoned and blighted homes.
“When I came back to North End, I saw the devastation, the vacancy, the abandonment, high crime level, people weren’t talking to each other,” Hebron said. “We had all this vacant land. There’s only been one house on this block demolished since I’ve been here.”
“The food justice movement was already happening,” Hebron added. “We don’t have any money, but we have all this land, and we need to partner with some of these organizations because food insecurity was very high here.”
She also feels that resilience is what is truly needed to help combat food insecurity here in Detroit.
Hebron said she expects to have this entire project up and running by 2028, and she could at least start to get things going by the summer, once they take control of the building.
They’re looking for funding right now, and she thinks this could cost about $8 to $10 million.
“We can be resilient through food, through emergency preparation, through engagement with each other,” Hebron said. “We can really reduce the amount of people, families that are food insecure in Detroit. Not just on the North End, but Rosedale Park, the East Side, West Side, and Southwest Detroit.”