For Black History Month, Forgotten Harvest wants to spend some time celebrating a few of our Black-led partnerships that work to sustain and improve our Metro Detroit communities.

City Covenant Church

Kicking off our Black History Month mini-series is City Covenant Church of Detroit’s Brightmoor neighborhood led by Pastor Semmeal Thomas and his family. This church and its community center across the street, Mission: City, have been serving the Brightmoor area and partnering with Forgotten Harvest for a little more than 20 years with the mission of “Helping create a community of independence one street, one family, one person at a time.”

Those seeking assistance from City Covenant do not need to be religious or spiritual to receive food or their other supportive offerings. Pastor Thomas told us, “We serve anybody. You don’t have to read the Scripture, you don’t have to go to the church, we serve anybody.”

“People come to the pantry at the church for food, and then we can build up trust and a relationship with people to open a conversation about their needs. I can send them over to Mission: City, our community center, and we can help them with resume skills or we could help them develop their business or we do tutoring or mentoring for children. We do programs over there that try to come alongside the major challenges we’re facing in underserved communities like Brightmoor and Detroit as a whole. And the flipside is, some people come out to the community center and then I’m able to ask them about their spiritual life, after building up credibility and trust.”

The City Covenant Church team partners with our tri-county-focused organization Forgotten Harvest, but keeps their operations intimately tied to their neighborhood to focus on caring for the families that come to them for support.

Pastor Thomas said, “We’re very intentional about remaining intimate. I want to target the 200 or so families within our community who we have relationships with and we can help them get to the point where they don’t need Forgotten Harvest. I have a saying that we’re in the business of putting ourselves out of business.”

And their work has been guided in part by Black History and Legacy, both in general and specifically in the city of Detroit. Born in Detroit in 1960, Pastor Thomas grew up in communities that knew systemic segregation and neglect.

He told us, “When I was a child, the most relevant thing in the community was either the church or the schools, just about everything came through either the church or the schools. So, when Black people couldn’t go to the bank to borrow money, they could come to the church. When Black people were in need of food or different social services, and they didn’t have healthcare or they didn’t have this or that, they came to the church.”

He went on, “It is no longer the thing in the community, and that’s okay, but for me, I wanted to make sure that same legacy that our ancestors left us that had this spiritual component was still relevant in our communities. The church should be this place of empowerment.” Citing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Pastor Thomas talked about City Covenant’s calling to extend their support to all walks of life, knowing there isn’t just one group of people affected by food insecurity and other socioeconomic issues.

Partnering with Forgotten Harvest allows them to offer that support at a significant scale, serving around 30,000 to 40,000 meals each year, without getting bogged down by the logistics of large-scale food sourcing.

“I don’t feel the need to save the world, but from an African American standpoint and the legacy, we were known for community. And the most communal thing you can do is eat. Forgotten Harvest helps us set the table. It allows us to provide a service to the community and then allows me to build some trust with them” to offer aid in other ways too, Pastor Thomas said.

The work City Covenant Church does in the Brightmoor community ripples out into the entire Metro Detroit area, expanding the care available to each of us as more of our neighbors receive needed support. Pastor Thomas and his family are glowing examples of community aid and connection, and they share their work to inspire others to get involved.

“If there was anything I want people to know, it’s that they can do it too. I don’t have a million-dollar budget. Empowerment—it can be scaled,” he shared. “There’s this concept that bigger is better, and another one of my sayings is, no, better is better.”

Every act of community care, no matter its size, lifts our collective. Forgotten Harvest is proud to partner with City Covenant Church and all our partners who understand we’re in this together and extend their support to empower our neighbors.