Focus on Health Equity: Forgotten Harvest mobile
markets expand access to
nutritious food

On a sunny morning in Dearborn, shoppers lined up to take their turn selecting healthy food from Forgotten Harvest’s Community Choice Mobile Market.

At their appointment time, each shopper chatted with a volunteer before rolling their grocery cart into a 29-foot trailer to make their selections from shelves stocked with canned goods, bread, milk and more. Designed to provide a grocery store-like experience, the Community Choice Mobile Market increases access to nutritious food for children, families, seniors and veterans who may face barriers to accessing established emergency food distribution sites.

“Transportation is one of the things that we’re trying to solve for. If they can’t come to the food, then we bring the food to them. It also is different than our regular options because they can choose what they need based on health conditions like diabetes,” says Chief Operating Officer Sheila Marshall.

“Then there’s the side benefits, like the sense of community that it builds,” Marshall adds. “A lot of people love the mobile market experience because they get the one-to-one communication and they get the one-to-one connection. Some of these seniors live alone. They don’t have many people, and they just want to talk. We know that when people are engaged in community, they live longer, happier lives.”

Forgotten Harvest fights food insecurity

Operating the Community Choice Mobile Market is just one way Forgotten Harvest pursues its mission to relieve hunger in metro Detroit and prevent nutritious food waste. It also rescues surplus perishable food from 700 donors, harvests more than 650,000 pounds of food annually from its farm and supplies a network of food relief agencies. The 35-year-old, Oak Park-based nonprofit serves 450,000 people each year.

The Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan recently made a $75,000 grant to help Forgotten Harvest expand its Community Choice Mobile Market pilot. The nonprofit’s goal is to operate five mobile market units providing distributions five days a week throughout Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties, with one unit solely serving seniors.

The Community Foundation grant aligns with our Health Equity focus area, which aims to increase access to quality health care, improve health outcomes and provide essential services to meet basic needs.

Community Foundation provides vital support

According to the 2024 American Community Survey, 581,444 people in the tri-county area — or approximately 15% of the total population — live in poverty, with that percentage more than twice as high in some communities. This leaves them at high risk of hunger and the serious long-term effects of chronic under-nutrition. It also forces many people to make tough decisions about whether to buy food or pay for essential medications.

Forgotten Harvest President and CEO Adrian Lewis says more people are facing these difficult decisions since the COVID-19 pandemic due to inflation and the rising cost of living. At the same time, federal cuts to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits have caused a surge in demand for emergency food assistance, even as Forgotten Harvest and other nonprofits face reductions in government funding that helps support their operations, Lewis says.

“We’re not here to be in a panic mode or to paint a picture of doom and gloom,” he says. “We’re here to be activated for what we know we have to do.”

Marshall and Lewis agree it will take a village to meet this challenge: Only by collaborating with its agency partners, its pool of 35,000 volunteers and funders like the Community Foundation will they all be able to scale and adapt to evolving community needs.

The Community Foundation helps make Forgotten Harvest’s mission possible, The ongoing support that you give for projects like the Community Choice Mobile Market and the partnership that you give — our work can’t be done without it.”

Sheila Marshall