Feel-Good Friday: An Entrepreneur Creates a Grocery Where His Detroit Neighbors Can Invest in Themselves

With all this talk from Kamala Harris about an opportunity agenda and her claims that Black entrepreneurs need a certain amount of startup capital that only the government can provide, this week’s Feel-Good Friday is about a Black entrepreneur who bootstrapped his own vision and invited the community to join him in that vision. The result: A successful grocery store in what is considered a food desert, that is also a community investment.

Last year grocer, gardener, and entrepreneur Raphael Wright opened Neighborhood Grocery, a small-scale market with a hyper-local focus, on Detroit’s East Side. It’s been nearly ten years since the city, with a 78 percent Black population, had a Black-owned grocery store. Wright, a Detroit native who grew up near the new market in Jefferson Chalmers, says he’s been listening to what his community has been asking for regarding healthy, local food. He’s working to provide fresh options and local products that haven’t been close or convenient for too long. 

Wright, a local entrepreneur, planned for the cooperative business model, mounting a GoFundMe to raise money toward the startup costs. Wright got the balance of the $85,000 in funds from a Motor City Match grant and this helped to finalize his plans. Wright opened the doors of Neighborhood Grocery in the summer of 2023, as a membership co-op where anyone over 18 can become an investor. Once the store breaks even, investors will receive a portion of the grocery store’s profits, which means the community is invested in the store’s thriving. 

“With business, there’s not going to be a lot of funding coming in unless it’s proven that it could work,” Wright says. “But the crowdfunding element proved to me that people believed in the dream. I’m very appreciative of all the support I have gotten, and I’m really focused on that.”

In 2020, Wright bought half an acre of vacant land to start a market garden to self-distribute produce to customers and grow produce to sell in the store. He’s harvested a variety of summer crops such as tomatoes, squash, salad greens, and turnips.   

“I was exposed to gardening, but I didn’t do it seriously until the pandemic,” he says. “Once the pandemic hit, it became a necessity and another opportunity to serve the neighborhood.”

And it does. the store stocks fruit and vegetables from four Black-owned farms, and features products that are made in Michigan, as well as national, brand name products. The look and feel of the place is no different from a Kroger or a Meijer, but its goods are sourced from the surrounding community. 

Because of this service to the community, in March, Wright was the recipient of a Presidential Lifetime Achievement Award. Wright also wants to extend the investment to youth, and offer business and financial literary opportunities for the community. He said:

This is something we give back in exchange for the investment in our store.Yes,  a way to finance, but this is how you change the neighborhood. You can’t keep asking for help outside. If we live in this city and want to change it, we have to do it ourselves.

Wright is creating his own opportunity agenda and teaching others how to do the same. When the power of entrepreneurship and ingenuity is unleashed, and government gets out of the way, there is nothing that cannot be achieved.