Back in 2000, the Reverend Bertha Carter got the Northend Christian Community Development Corporation started by helping to feed hungry people who had no real access to food out of the back of her van.
In the spring of that year, she went looking for help, hoping to expand on the number of people she could help by urging her Northend congregation to address the neighborhood’s need for food security. The group’s goal was to grow healthy food, offer mentorships, conduct educational programs, support outdoor gatherings and art spaces, and generating jobs.
And the Oakland Avenue Urban Farm was born.
For more than a decade the farm, now a workforce development project of the NECCDC and located in Detroit’s historic North End, has been a stabilizing force. By growing healthy food, hosting educational programs, creating cultural gathering spaces, and generating jobs, the farm is achieving its vision for a vibrant civic commons that will continue to benefit the neighborhood for decades to come.
“Mom being the preacher that she was noticed that many of the people who came into worship in the neighborhood did not live in the neighborhood,” said Jerry Hebron, Carter’s daughter and now the corporation’s executive director. “They originally are from the neighborhood, had roots in the neighborhood, but they would come into worship and then immediately after church, they would leave.
“Mom said they weren’t having an impact on the people’s lives who actually live in the community,” Hebron added. “What she saw was people that were hungry, people that needed housing, people that needed jobs, children that needed safe spaces. And so that was her mission, to provide food to the hungry, to provide a safe haven for kids that they could come and learn and be fed after school.
“Our mission … is to cultivate people and community through food and community development. We use food as the tool to do that. People can’t do anything if they’re just hungry.”
When she came to work with her mother who, Hebron said, has “touched a lot of people,” Hebron wasn’t unfamiliar with the area, having grown up in the neighborhood as a child, although it wasn’t quite the same. Growing up, she said, the neighborhood had schools and shopping and good housing.
“We had a lot,” she said. “Everybody knew everybody. And so we played in the streets. We played in the alleys, which were clean. There were no vacant burned out houses. Coming back into the neighborhood, I saw the opposite. I saw street lights were nonexistent. Grass was five feet tall, dumping burned out houses or houses that had been torn down and you had a lot of lots. It was a completely different look and feel. There was a high crime rate, drug activity.”
While Reverend Carter is still active in the organization, Hebron is now running things.
“Our mission is to cultivate food people and community through and community development,” she said. “And we use food as the tool to do that.”
At her mom’s behest, Hebron came aboard to help run the corporation. The goal at the time was to get people back out of their houses, to create a safe space for them. The question: How?
Hebron knew all that property on Oakland Avenue, which once had held houses but was now available, could provide the answer. The idea, she said, was to change the way Oakland Avenue looked by building out a garden and creating a “beautiful, green space,” then get the word out that it was open and welcome to be used by anybody. What started out as a 20×20 lot now covers some 10 acres.
“It worked … People thought it was amazing,” Hebron said. “They thought it was beautiful. They were turning around in their cars, doing U-turns in the streets to come back to see what was going on. They were sending their kids down there because it looked beautiful and they felt like it was safe. It was just a whole different vibe.
“That’s when you know you’ve done something right,” she added. “When you get somebody who turns around and comes back because they can’t believe what they just saw, you did it right.”
Hebron sat down with Corp! Magazine to talk about the corporation and other issues:
Corp! Magazine: You’ve got 10 acres, so it’ not just about the food, is it?
Jerry Hebron: So it’s not just food production. We had green spaces for festivals and people rent the space for weddings and things like that. We have structures, so we actually on our block own six structures that we were able to acquire due to tax foreclosure or people just walking away from the houses, and then we were able to renovate these properties and bring them back to life.
We rezoned the area so that it’s not just residential. We can expand it for things like an AirBnB, we have an artist gallery space. We have a couple of resource centers. In 2020, all of our libraries shut down and because of Covid. Well, many of those libraries are still closed, and so our kids need access to books. They need access to computers. So we have a computer lab. People can come in and do job searches, create emails and things like that. It’s just amazing to be able to bring life back to this neighborhood.
Corp!: Talk about a couple of the programs that you guys run that you’re really proud of.
Hebron: I would say our stellar program is the Oakland Avenue Farmer’s Market and the Farm, because what that allows us to do is hire people and we hire people from the neighborhood, but we have a primary focus of hiring returning citizens. So most of the people we work with have been incarcerated, sometimes for a long time, sometimes for a short period of time. Our main goal with this population is to help people reduce the number of gaps that they have to traditional employment.
So we help people get through their probationary period or their parole period. We help them with their ID, we help them, some of them have fees that they have to pay, maybe parking fees or other tickets or things like that. We help them through that process and then help build a resume that allows them to take that and then go and seek traditional employment because they have worked with us.
We’re able to provide them employment letters of recommendation to our partners. And then it’s really beautiful to be able to have a community that do not have to rely on public transportation or even be required to have a car because they’re able to walk or ride their bike to work. Those are the people that we’re most concerned about in our neighborhoods. When we look at employment opportunities, we do pay a living wage to the people who work with us. So that’s our stellar program and we call that a healing workforce development program.
Corp!: It sounds like a great program.
Hebron: It’s beautiful because even people who come and volunteer with us, like (recently), we had 60 young boys coming to the farm from U of D High School. They come to us twice a year; we’ve had as many as 120, but they spend the day with us with their chaperones. They are thrilled to be on the campus. They work really, really hard, and they get that what they’re doing is giving back to a community that is less fortunate than they are. These are the type of opportunities that we are able to provide that makes our work stellar, and it makes people feel good when they walk away.
Corp!: You had your first Souls in the Garden program recently. How did that go?
Hebron: Oh my Lord, it really exceeded my expectation. I received calls from folks who were there … telling me how amazing it was. First of all, the weather was beautiful, no complaints there, and people were just happy. They thought this was probably the biggest event that has happened in the North end in a long time. People were calling to thank me for bringing this event to the community and making sure that folks in community could get there.
Corp!: You were celebrating 25 years of service. What does that mean to you personally, that you guys have been doing it for 25 years?
Hebron: Well, when we realized we were approaching our 25th year of service, it was like, “Wow, we have really come a very long way in terms of just being still in this community, providing resources and engaging people in the community.” And so my mother, she was turning 94 this year, and I felt eternally grateful to have my mother still here, and I was, like, “This would be the best time in the world to just acknowledge her for her vision and her prayers and her trust in allowing us to carry on.
She just handed this off to me. I didn’t have a clue of what I was going to do or how effective it was going to be or anything like that. And my mother didn’t micromanage us. She didn’t interfere. She just trusted us to go ahead. On the one thing she told us that we still honored today because make sure you love God’s people and that you don’t fence off anything that this property remain open and welcoming to everybody.
It’s beautiful. We do not own the alley, but we manage the alley and of course it is open to the public. In addition to that, we have green spaces. We have some walking trails and people can just come anytime. They don’t need my permission. The kids come and play. People come and have lunch, have little picnics, people from the school down the street. Some of the teachers walk down and eat lunch. That’s what my mom wanted.
Corp!: You have all of these things going on. It’s not exactly inexpensive. How do you fund it all?
Hebron: We are funded through philanthropy, and it’s tough. We’ve lost four proposal opportunities this year due to federal cuts, but there’s still funders out there that are supporting us. Sometimes it’s a little slow coming, but we’re still holding on by the knuckles. We have private donations that come in as well. So for example, if you were to visit our [email protected], we have a donate button. It’s easy to make a donation. People do that all the time. We do sell produce to Eastern Market and to Detroit Food, which is a new co-op that opened last year.
Corp!: What’s next for you guys? What’s the new program? Expansion, more engagement? What’s on the horizon?
Hebron: One of the big projects that we have happening right now is the Detroit Cultivator Community Land Trust, and all of our properties are now seeded over to the Land Trust, which is under the community control for about a hundred years. We were very concerned about speculative development, and I personally don’t own these properties, so it’s like how do we keep these properties protected and supporting the folks in community?
That is why we developed the Land Trust. So what we’re working on right now is a housing project that we should have shovels in the ground in the first quarter of 2026. We’re building 16 units, and then because we are the developer, all those development fees come to us, which is going to help us in terms of doing more houses, but it’s also going to help us in terms of sustaining our operational budgets.
Corp!: How do people help? How do they get involved?
Hebron: We’re always looking for volunteers. So people can volunteer with us. They can go online and [email protected], register for volunteering. They can donate on the same site (northend cdc.org). We have a donate button there and people can support our farmer’s market, which is open from June to September. During the summer, however, we also sell produce like a lady called today and placed a big order for local produce. She only wanted local produce, and so we happened to have everything she needed and she placed her order for pickup today at three o’clock. Cool. You can like us on our social media, we have something called Harvest on Demand. So people like that because they can pull up, tell us what they need and we’ll harvest it for them while they make another run or something like that and come back and pick it up. We’ve been doing that since COVID.
