Carver Jones Market opened in Fairfield on Wednesday, the first grocery offering fresh meat and produce in the city in nearly a decade.
The Rev. Alton Hardy, founding pastor of Urban Hope Community Church, which he started in 2012, began working several years ago with supermarket veteran James Harris, now CEO of Carver Jones Market, to come up with a plan for their shared vision of a grocery to serve a needy community.
They got $3 million in support from non-profit ministries, including Clerestory Inc., to launch it.
“That was initial investment and working capital,” said Harris, a management veteran of stores including Safeway, Bruno’s and Food World.
From now on, the store must turn a profit to succeed, he said. “You cannot hope you’re going to make a profit,” Harris said.
“It was on God’s heart to be able to do something that others would call impossible, to go to an area that others have called God-forsaken, to do something with the mindset. There are no people he does not love with all of his heart.”
After the Walmart Supercenter in Fairfield closed in 2016, Fairfield had no supermarket where residents could buy fresh meat and produce. It’s considered a “food desert,” and there are thousands of similar communities nationwide that could be helped by the same model if this one succeeds, Harris said.
“There’s over 3,500 locations like this that need grocery stores,” Harris said. “This is the prototype.”
Carver Jones Market is located at 4800 Gary Avenue, across the street from Restoration Academy and Fairfield City Hall, in a building owned by the Urban Hope Community Church.
“Our church has been at the forefront,” Hardy said. “We bought the building, we built it out and we raised the funds for operations.”
It’s not just a supermarket, but a ministry, he said.
“The obvious question people ask is, ‘Who is behind this? Where’d the money come from?’” Hardy said.
“No politician, no foundation was able to do it. Banks told me no. The people who did believe it, who gave the money, $2 million worth and another million dollars for operations, were Christians. I get choked up. These conservative Christians put their money where their mouth is.”
Urban Hope was a church plant of the Presbyterian Church in America, through its congregations in the Evangel Presbytery – including Briarwood, Covenant, Altadena, Oak Mountain, Red Mountain, and Faith Presbyterian – that cooperated to bring the Alabama native Hardy from Grand Rapids, Michigan, to start the church in 2012. Hardy grew up in Sardis, south of Selma.
“All my PCA churches, if they were not behind me, there would be no Urban Hope Community Church,” Hardy said. “Most people that see me would not think I’m Presbyterian.”
Another of the church’s ministry programs, Urban Hope Leadership Initiative, operates upstairs from the market in lofts, training Black men who are college graduates on how to be better Christian leaders, Hardy said.
The Carver Jones Market will also have a pharmacy by the end of September, said Kim Blair, co-owner with her husband, pharmacist Daniel Blair, of Blair Pharmacy in Alabaster. “We exist to honor God, serve our patients and care for people,” she said.
Fairfield, once a boomtown that thrived on the steel industry after the city’s founding in 1910, has been losing business and hope for decades as the steel industry declined, said Fairfield City Council member E.J. Foster, also an elder of Urban Hope Community Church.
Getting a new grocery store seemed like a fantasy, he said.
“It seemed like a hopeless dream,” Foster said. “For some it may seem like a little corner store. It’s going to go a long way.”
