As Newark opens community grocery stores in all five wards this month, here is how the first one came to be, told by one of the people who built it.
By Jaydeen DeCambre
I came into this project with knowledge that was a little bit of everything and a mastery of nothing that mattered for what was ahead. I had experience. I had instincts. What I did not have was any real sense of what it takes to turn an empty space into a working grocery store that a whole neighborhood is counting on. Nothing prepares you for that except the doing. So I did it.
And I want to be clear right away, because it would be a lie to tell it any other way: I did not do this alone. I could not do this alone.
I oversaw the project, but Naim, Property and Real Estate Manager for Clinton Hill Community Action, is the reason the building actually came together. He handled all the logistics I could not be in ten places to watch, staying on the contractors, making sure the work we asked for was the work that got done. Chopp Stewart, of Florida Water Interior Design, an accomplished interior designer and someone who holds community and culture with a high esteem, sat with me through meeting after meeting, combing through design choices most people will never notice, the colors, the light, even the smell, asking the question we kept coming back to: how is this going to make people feel when they walk in. Not just whether it looked right but whether it felt like ours.
And it was never only us. We held community meetings and food-for-thought discussions with the greater Clinton Hill community, over and over, because a grocery store built for the neighborhood without the neighborhood in the room is just a building. We wanted what people actually wanted, and the only way to know that was to ask, and keep asking, and let the answers change what we were doing.
This idea started out of the pandemic, out of the way food insecurity became such a glaring problem in the South Ward and Clinton Hill. It was not that the problem wasn’t already here. It was. But the pandemic made it glare. So Clinton Hill Community Action set out on a mission to address it the only way we know how, with community. We held virtual meetings until we could meet in person. We spoke with residents. We polled, we surveyed, we ideated, we studied food models from around the country, all of it aimed at one thing: a long-term solution built with the people who would actually use it.
The original idea was a food co-op. We worked toward that diligently, until we understood something about co-ops. They are a long-term endeavor. Not always, but most of the time, they take three, five, sometimes ten years to organize and open. And the need in front of us was not a ten-year need. It was a right-now need. So we found another path. The idea of a mutual aid grocery store emerged, a space that could serve the community now, and we set out to build it.
First we had to find a home. We searched high and we searched low. There were a few close calls, spaces we thought would be ours before they fell through. And then we found a landlord who was a Son of Newark. Kai Campbell, restaurateur and lifetime Newark resident with deep ties to this city, had a space for us to see, and that space became our home, right next to what was once an iconic South Ward deli, Bragman’s. From there came the contractors, the designers, the vendors, and we kept every piece of it as local as we could.
After two years of meeting with the community, watching food documentaries, learning about co-ops and mutual aid and the real work of grocery management and logistics, we opened on October 25, 2024.
Let me say that date again, because the story is already being told wrong. October 25, 2024. That was before the city-owned grocery model everyone now calls “Mamdani-style” had entered the national conversation, and years after we started this work in our own neighborhood. While New York’s version was still a proposal, ours was already open, stocked, and feeding people. We did not copy anyone. We were here first.
Our mission was simple and it was serious: to bring nutritious, healthy, culturally relevant food to a community that has long lived under food apartheid. We wanted more than a place to buy groceries. We wanted a place where the community could gather and learn about eating for their best health. A place where neighbors could vend their own specialty-made items and make real money serving and providing for the people around them. But most of all, we wanted a place where hardworking folks who cared about eating whole, unprocessed food, food that was good for their bodies, food that was good for their souls, food that was relevant to their culture, had somewhere within walking distance to get fed.
I feel it in my own life. Just yesterday I picked up elderberry syrup at Our Community Grocery Store, made locally by Rabbit Hole Farms, to keep my children’s immune systems up as they head back to school. Not long ago I overheard a customer talk about how she keeps her children smelling like roses with the rose-scented castile soap she buys from us. That same instinct follows me home. I wash my family’s clothes in True detergent, a Black-owned and veteran-owned brand that is gentle on my sensitive skin, because getting to support people I believe in while I take care of my own is exactly the point. That is what all of this is. A store, yes. But also a way of living, where the dollars you spend go to people and products you stand behind, woven into the small daily ways we care for the ones we love.
And that is the whole point. The only way a community grocery store survives is through community involvement and engagement. It is built on the belief that everyone can be served and provided for in a way that is dignified, if we are willing to work together.
We are the proof that it works. What started on Hawthorne Avenue is now the example Newark is following into every ward. But staying the standard is not automatic, and it was never something we could carry alone. A store like this grows from the inside. Every time you shop with us, you make room for more to fill the shelves. If there is something you want to see here, a brand, a product, an item your family loves, tell us. Come to a meeting. Bring your ideas straight to us, because this store can only become what you need if you help us build it. And if you make something yourself, there is a place for it here too, a way to sell what you create and earn from serving your own neighbors.
This was never meant to be a place you visit once and size up from the outside. It is a place to belong to. So come in, tell us what is missing, and let us build it together. The community you live in is exactly where you invest, to better the quality of your life and the lives of everyone around you. Be part of the solution. We already are.
