Barb Matney watched a family pull a wagon down her Warrendale street, knocking on doors and asking neighbors for food. That moment of witnessing hunger in her own community became the spark that would transform an entire neighborhood. "We saw a family pulling a wagon, and they were knocking on doors asking for food," Matney recalled. "And we decided that's unacceptable here in Detroit."
That determination led Matney and her husband to found the In Memory of Community Garden in 2015, a nonprofit that has grown from a single plot into a thriving community anchor. The garden now produces corn, zucchini, beans, collard greens, parsley, and oregano—vegetables that neighbors can take home free during harvest season if they volunteer their time and labor. Whatever produce remains after the harvest goes to market, with proceeds covering essential costs like the water bill that keeps the garden alive through Detroit's seasons.
The beauty of the model lies in its reciprocity. Tom Scott, who has lived in Warrendale for four decades, discovered this firsthand when he began volunteering. "Everything we've done here, I've been a part of. The building, the planting," Scott said with evident pride. For him, walking down the street to pick fresh parsley or oregano from the garden his own hands helped build feels like something no distant market could ever replicate. "You can't get a market this close, and it's a great feeling to know we did it," he reflected.
But the In Memory of Community Garden has become far more than a source of fresh produce. Matney and her team have built a playground and are currently developing a multicultural center—infrastructure that signals permanence and investment in Warrendale's future. These projects have catalyzed something harder to measure but impossible to miss: a shift in the neighborhood's spirit. When the nonprofit first began its work, Warrendale felt withdrawn. "When we first started this, there was nobody outside, nobody was walking, nobody had their blinds open, nobody was on their porch," Matney observed. But as the garden took root and the community rallied around it, the neighborhood came back to life. Blinds rose. Porches filled. Streets became places where neighbors encountered one another again.
Matney attributes this transformation to something fundamental about shared purpose. "The way things are today, it's really important we all work together, we all want the same goals, let's get it done," she said. It's a simple philosophy, but one that has proven powerful in practice. A single moment of witnessing need—a family with a wagon—became an invitation to neighbors to build something together. Nearly a decade later, that invitation continues to bear fruit, both literally in the garden beds and in the renewed sense of community that now flourishes in Warrendale.