Many of us have a vision of what we want our lives to look like. It could be based on the reality around us, it may be what we see on t.v. or what we read about in magazines and novels. For some, our vision is narrowly inspired by societal forces that tell us what we should be envisioning.

While some are more more inclined to dream big, to create a rich tableau made up of everything delicious and exciting and mostly out of reach, some of us are content with the vision that makes for a comfortable life, no frills necessary, just the security of knowing that our basic needs are taken care of, that a foundation of order is present, and our families remain secure in the knowledge that larger possibilities loom for the next generation.

What many of us forget is that our vision is enhanced by memory. I bring this up because as we look around at some of our cities in need, cities like Detroit and Atlanta, we tend to superimpose a vision of our current and future reality upon a bedrock of memory.

These were once very vital centers. We remember them as such based on what we’ve seen preserved in monument, in images, and in the stories we’ve passed down.

We believe in a city’s possibility because we remember past vibrancy.

Our cities sometimes seem like solid containers that keep us grounded through time and structure. But that is not really the case either. Our cities are no more solid than our lives are. And a city is only as vibrant as the quality of the memories that are created within it. Look at any of the recent action movies like Oblivion. They show versions of the future in which earth’s population has been mostly wiped out from its own gratuitous use of resources or catastrophic violence that lay waste to the entire global community.

Throughout each of these films, the remnants write the history and the future.

What’s been left of humanity is what is marked sacred not by religion, but by memory. A spark of consciousness that binds the barren landscape and what’s been left on it to the restoration that eventually takes place.

The physical cluster of the city itself may have been lost because the people and things that made it up are gone. But the civilization is salvaged by the love we have for place and the people that once embodied it.

Like our own bodies, our cities have soul. A center that never dies. Because a city is a collection of our lives.

As with our own souls, it can get mired in its pain and distracted by its wounds enough that it forgets its purpose. It becomes like a body that eats only fast food, listens to hopeless music, knows only punishment without love, grows in fear, and dies prematurely.

These things happen to cities because they happen to people. Because we are the city. And yet we forget that healing is possible.

Nearly a year and a half ago my brother and I embarked on an experiment. We are neither academics nor developers nor are we foodies. But we had this hundred year old property that we inherited in 2009 adjacent to downtown Atlanta that became vacant. When our dad bought it in 1984, the area had already been run down for years. It was a shell of a neighborhood on a street that was once a bustling center for commerce in the 1940s and 50s that had devolved into a transitional strip existing less than a half mile from City Hall, a grim corridor surrounded by a Greyhound bus station, city jail, and a homeless shelter. Some revitalization efforts were being made towards converting old lofts into residences in early 2000s but, although housing was being built, the elements that make up a healthy community were not being implanted.

Folks could not understand why there was stagnation. Why was the neighborhood not growing into a healthy place that encouraged other people to visit or move into?

We watched the neighborhood association for a year or two as it fostered unnecessary competition, shifted blame, and hoarded resources without offering long-term solutions before it became clear to us what was lacking was a positive anchor.

From the beginning the store we envisioned had a purpose more grand than the typical corner store.

Through our business, The Boxcar Grocer, we sought to help restore the soul of a once vital community.

A typical small format corner store often brings more death in its wake than life by fostering dependence upon liquor, lottery tickets, and chemical-laden foods that ravage the bodies of its customers.

The Boxcar Grocer, with its mission to eradicate food deserts, sought to breathe life into the land, to inspire the community, and heal our little corner of the city in a way that is similar to reviving a soul’s purpose. It’s a lofty goal, right? I mean, we’re just a store. We’re selling milk and eggs and juice and bananas.

But from the beginning, a creative spark kept me awake at night until it had a name, until it had a plan, until it had the means to rise out of the debris and led me to knock on history’s door in an effort to re-write the future.

The Boxcar Grocer urges you to care about your community by first reminding you to care for your body. It builds upon an energy that implores us to heal ourselves first. It’s not just about the food.  But then again, we contend that food access is not just a food issue, it’s a community development issue. We understand that it is not a lack of life that we are combating in some of these densely populated urbanscapes, it is a lack of vitality. For a vital community one needs access to healthy food, economic opportunity, opportunities to improve health, educational opportunities, and recreational activities.

People need access to many services that are lacking within so-called food deserts.

What makes the perfect recipe to restore balance and harmony to our cities?

What makes a healthy individual is no more a mystery than what makes a healthy neighborhood, which creates a healthy community, which builds a city fragrant with wellness and not decay. Many items are on the list: urban gardens, clean water, walkable neighborhoods, centers that encourage spiritual growth, healthy food, friendly neighbor interactions, affordable housing, security, access to art, enrichment classes and schools, and many other things that encourage reasons to smile.

Only when this matrix exists for all communities within an urban area can we heal our cities.

Because within this type of environment one can be healthy and get sick occasionally without necessarily dying. It merely calls for a timely correction to restore balance.

Perfection is not the purpose, but purpose must be restored.

We can have many purposes in our lives and as many soul mates as it takes for us to realize our potential. Our own mascot we pulled from a figure in history that provided a beacon of service and quality for the Pullman Company and within the Black community became a source of pride that lifted families out of poverty. The Pullman Porter is a soul mate of ours. But then so are black farmers, civil rights leaders, and the train system itself.

Businesses that contribute to the health of our communities, our people, rather than contribute to their decline are the soul mates our cities have been looking for to bring vitality back to our urban deserts. Businesses can be for-profit or non-profit but what makes these types of businesses so unique, so useful is that they understand that a good romance comes with restrictions.

We don’t want massive, all consuming growth at the expense of our communities, nor do we want co-dependence that makes us weary and depleted and too sluggish and weighed down to grow. We want to be able to dance around the room a little bit. To enjoy the beauty that leads to a successful relationship.

Like all major American cities, Detroit has had its soul mates in the past: Motown, Ford, Hudson’s.  But we have to remember that even if we marry our soul mates, the marriage doesn’t always last for eternity. We should be inspired by them. We should grow with them and learn and prosper, and when the time comes to let them go, let them go with respect in a way that is beneficial to both parties. Letting go peacefully with the lessons retained means life can keep going in a healthy way that allows us the space to allow new soul mates to enter, to grow and to create a beautiful new life together.

Death is a transitional rite of passage. Some parts of our cities have had to die for us to re-imagine a better future. It reminds us of the cyclical nature of life but if we’re not careful the dead can take us with them.  Don’t get caught up with the ghosts, but be inspired by the memory. Action is the only option.

Beauty and power can create the balance that must be restored through action and a will towards wholeness.

One of the lines from our self-written manifesto declares: We believe it is time to abandon the battlefield for the banquet hall.

The battlefields of the past have scarred our cities and our people. The warriors and the wounded are left to carry the burden. But the same tools we use to destroy, used differently can be the same tools we use to nourish. Our knives don’t serve us by stabbing each other in the backs over what we are told are limited resources. They serve us by being able to slice our pieces of the pie and share the delight. It takes a conscious choice to decide how we are going to proceed.

Gaiety abounds in the banquet hall. A zest for life and the promise of a hopeful future is what we celebrate in banquet halls. Which is why The Boxcar Grocer started to heal the community with food.

Around the time when we first opened, I wrote an article for Grist called What if Jay-Z Ran a Healthy Corner Store? It really speaks to our mindset around growing an organic standard as a lifestyle brand through The Boxcar Grocer, similar to how Jay-Z grew his brand.

We thought that would be an easier way to bridge the cultural gap that keeps people buying and eating unhealthy food because culture is a much bigger factor than income. When Jay-Z raps: “(Ball so hard), got a broke clock, Rolleys that don’t tick tock, Audemars that’s losing time, hidden behind all these big rocks?” it’s not because the average person can afford ridiculously expensive wristwatches, it’s because it’s aspirational and it’s fun. If you also make it more convenient and fun to be healthy than unhealthy, then people and cities will really shift. JayZ has been selling out stadiums for years. When you ask somebody, why do you listen to Jay Z, no one says well, i wanted a qualitative analysis of what it’s like to live in the inner city. No, people say because it’s fun. It makes you feel good. It gives you swagger. That’s his brand.

We created The Boxcar Grocer to be aspirational, fun, and convenient. A corner store with a soul. Within our communities, we either embrace our purpose and move forward with the creativity that follows or continue to witness the inevitable decline that leads towards death, useless competition, and ultimate destruction of our cities.

We’re not used to the idea of places having soul. It’s kind of a pagan idea if you think about it, the power of which has been stripped from us through fear. And yet, we carry with us the spark of this truth. We know that when we conjure the idea of home as a place, it is a powerful current that runs through our blood. From here, it is not hard to expand the notion of home to the heart of our cities and believe that our cities have soul.

So I ask you to consider: how can purpose drive a population?

With our store we found that by connecting with the land and reaching out to farmers who look like the population we are serving it restores a connection that had been severed years ago with The Great Migration. Isabel Wilkerson details this shift from the South to Northern industrial cities so beautifully in her book The Warmth of Other Suns. Women and men, like many of my great-aunts and uncles, fled farms in the hopes of living more fulfilling lives. They came to cities like Detroit, New York, and Oakland, many by train. By embracing this part of our hopeful history, we were able create a distinct brand that carries with it a sense of purpose beyond the corner on which our store stands.

The train is a powerful signifier for many communities, of the power of movement and the strength of connection. They took my aunts and uncles away from farms that were destroying their lives and led them to cities in which they could grow new families with spirits intact. The specter of slavery and the brutality of Jim Crow that led whole families to get on trains and run from farms, farming, working the land, and head towards destinations that promised much more than dehumanization and drudgery, however, created a schism that was replaced by manufactured foods leading to food-related illnesses.

But now that we can aspire to be more than chattel, we must remember how vital the land is, how it can nurture us and how fertile it can be for our bodies and our souls. How we must remember to connect with the land and the food it produces to create new memories, invoke new purpose, re-imagine the power of soul and heal our connection to the land and with it, our connection to real food.

Farms like Habesha in Atlanta use the land as a teaching tool and as a motivator for youth to be more entrepreneurial in their mindset. They teach math and science through farming and reward children who complete the program with travel to Africa. Truly Living Well farm is another wonderful educational center on 4-acres in the heart of the historical civil rights district in the middle of Atlanta. It supplies organic vegetables, herbs, and fruits to the top restaurants in the city and employs and educates a workforce that is poised to grow Atlanta’s booming urban agriculture scene.

If we call towards our cities only those who endeavor to merely make money, we will have failed. Commerce with a purpose drives population with a purpose. Businesses that stand along with people that have a purpose are the cities that are emerging from the fog to inspire growth and healthy communities.

Our understanding that food access is a community development issue, not just a food issue is what drives my brother to spearhead business development in our community. To bring a mix of services that benefit and add value to the community helps to breathe life into the soul that is our city.

Tony Hsieh and Zappo’s are leading Las Vegas towards revitalization that is not entirely bound to gaming but takes into account the happiness factor of its employees and its residents. Austin has remade itself from a college town into a innovative tech and music hub for the South that calls people near and far each year for the multiple South By Southwest conferences it hosts. And Detroit? It has been loved as a manufacturing hub. But companies like Shinola and Quicken are capitalizing on the memory of Detroit and investing in its resurgence. Sure we need engineers, but we also need designers, artists, and urban farmers.

Atlanta was built on a legacy of emergence from war, of liberation through peace, and on education and retains a sense of spirit through the words of Martin Luther King and the nostalgia of Coca Cola. How could we not want to start The Boxcar Grocer there and tap into the soul of a city that has always re-emerged throughout its own history as a paradigm of purpose?

Before you stand, before you embark on trying to heal others and clear the rubble from a city that is in need of vitality, ask yourself, do you remember your purpose? Don’t let the downcycles in history weigh you down, let them be the inspiration. There is beauty in being able to honor one’s history while transcending its pain.

Only then can you turn to your city and ask, does what you are doing benefit more than just yourself? Is it respectful of the history out of which it has grown and is it strong enough to inspire life?

Is the strength of its purpose the source of its beauty?

Ask it of yourself. Ask it of your friends and family. Ask it of the businesses you support.  Ask it and demand it of everything you put your energy towards and with beautiful intention it will become your community.

(original speech delivered at Van Dusen Lecture Series in Detroit, MI)