Detroit woman brings fresh, healthy food to her corner of the city

After nearly three decades of working as a registered nurse, Detroiter Sonya Greene is opening a fresh produce market in her neighborhood.

Greene cares deeply about the health and wellbeing of the people around her, and one of the biggest hurdles to health for many in the city is the lack of fresh, affordable and easily available produce and other daily grocery items.

In the community that Greene has called home since the 1980s – the Linwood-Dexter neighborhood – grocery options are not what they once were. When space in a commercial building owned by her family became available, Greene saw an opportunity to help her community by opening the Linwood Fresh Market.

CultureShift sat down with Greene and writer Darlene A. White, who profiled Greene and her vision of bringing fresh, healthy food to her corner of the city.

“I subscribe to what I was taught: Much is given, much is required. People are like, ‘Why are you doing this? You could have sat back in your lovely home and just waited for some developer to come through and give you a little bit of money and retire to Florida.’ And that just wasn’t what was in my heart. That was not what I was led to do.” — Sonya Greene, Linwood Fresh Market owner

This segment originally aired in September 2022.