Lucky Majid owns a business and lives in the same East Side community where he grew up.

“I love this neighborhood,” he said. “I go out with customers. We play games together. They come to my house. We went to school together.”

This might come as a surprise if all you know about Majid is that he is a Yemeni-American who operates a convenience store in one of the region’s poorest neighborhoods.

Like his father before him, he runs the store at Sycamore and Herman streets in the Broadway-Fillmore District. He started a Cricket Wireless franchise inside the shop while in his late teens, renamed the place Lucky’s Food Mart after he took ownership, and last year leased part of the space for a smoothie shop.

Majid, 40, has long wanted to bring healthier foods and more hope into a neighborhood that for decades has had too little of both. But with limited means himself, he has felt largely abandoned by those from outside East Buffalo with good intentions to help lift this part of the city – but maybe not much insight.

"They spend millions of dollars on the Broadway Market to make that place look nice,” he said. “Why don't you help us, too? Give us some grants to expand. It's not like we're taking money somewhere else.”

That message began to resonate a half-decade ago in the regional health and wellness field, where leaders and planners decided to listen more closely to those with direct needs and interests. In the case of Majid and a dozen other convenience store owners, the transformation began to take hold with the Healthy Corner Store Initiative.

Lucky Majid, owner of Lucky's Food Mart, hopes the Healthy Corner Store Initiative spurs better health for his customers and more business opportunities for him and others in East Buffalo.

In the three months since the Tops massacre, a broad network of local advocates, organizers and social entrepreneurs – plus public and private funders – have accelerated efforts to improve food access in disinvested neighborhoods.

Cornell Cooperative Extension of Erie County launched the initiative in 2014, after a group concerned about regional health inequality gathered at the invitation of the John R. Oishei Foundation to discuss how to help those who could use more support.

The initiative aims to bring affordable, locally grown fresh fruits and vegetables to corner stores in neighborhoods where many residents have limited transportation and lack easy access to full-service markets a mile or more away.

That involves 56,000 households, many in four East Buffalo ZIP codes: 14208, 14211, 14212 and 14215.

The initiative was slow to get off the ground, but picked up steam in 2018, when General Mills steered a grant to the United Way of Buffalo and Erie County, and Sheila Bass, a Cooperative Extension nutrition educator, became its coordinator.

“The corner stores seem to be a main support system in some of these local communities,” said Bass, who assembled partners to assure a reliable source of fruits, veggies and other wholesome foods, as well as store owners willing to renovate their spaces with prominent healthy food displays.

The plan also involves better highlighting the value and affordability of related foods, in part by offering “Health Bucks” discounts and, more importantly, inviting “healthy food community advocates” who learned to eat right to share that knowledge within their own neighborhoods.

“If you focus the main portion of your meals on fresh fruits and vegetables, it actually is more cost-effective,” Bass said, “versus fast foods or some of the high-fat meat proteins.”

Becca Townsend, of The Copy Store, holds part of a mural symbolizing healthy eating as she receives input from Ed Helm at  Lucky's Food Mart as part the Healthy Corner Stone Initiative.

Part of a larger effort

Michael Ball, vice president of community affairs with Highmark BCBS of WNY.

Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield of Western New York liked that approach and provided a three-year, $300,000 grant starting in 2020 through its Blue Fund.

“If you can make the case that you can eat healthy in an affordable way that ultimately will save you money on your health care and improve your quality of life, then where you live shouldn't determine how healthy you can be,” said Mike Ball, the Highmark vice president of community affairs who administers the fund. “Since many residents in the city go to the corner store to purchase food and other services, it's important that we put our resources there.”

The Blue Fund aims to eliminate health disparities and improve wellness in the region. It focuses on mental and cardiovascular health, health care workforce development, maternal health and the health of children.

It gets about $30 million worth of requests and awards up to $5 million each year, Ball said.

“What makes this corner story project unique,” he said, “is the comprehensive nature of it.”

Ali Majid, a Lucky's Food Mart employee and son of owner Lucky Majid, gifts grapes to longtime customer Sharon Wolfrum at the Sycamore Street convenience store, which participates in the Healthy Corner Store Initiative.

Bass worked with the University at Buffalo Food Systems Planning and Healthy Communities Lab, as well as growers, marketers and other partners as it prepared to roll out the program. She looked to turn some of the Healthy Corner Store locations into healthy hubs, with bright, brimming displays, table space for food demonstrations and furniture where store visitors could stay a while as they learned how buy and prepare healthy foods.

Lucky’s was among those picked as a hub.

“Just like everything else, that had a direct impact on the program,” Bass said. She and her partners worked to provide store owners personal protective equipment, particularly during 2020. They arranged to bring more fresh produce into participating stores and, when Covid-19 conditions warranted, presented some educational programming outdoors.

The program also started to distribute $5 Health Bucks coupons that must be used to buy fruits, veggies and other designated healthy choices.

Partners now include Urban Fruits & Veggies, Field & Fork Network, Buffalo Promise Neighborhood, the Erie County Department of Public Health, UB and D’Youville College.

The Blue Fund also began supporting related projects, including delivery of Buffalo Go Green prepared meals to the corner stores and sites on the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus.

“We've invested over a million dollars in food-related initiatives,” said Ball, “and what's great about the Healthy Corner Store Initiative is that it's also connecting many of those partners together.”

Trade Fair Food Market owner Adel Munassar, left, discusses healthy food options in 2018 in front of one of the "Fresh Fast Food" refrigerated cases at his East Delavan Avenue store with Sheila Bass, coordinator with the Healthy Corner Store Initiative. 

Those tied to the food programs entered this year with a renewed sense of purpose. They hope their efforts will bring more investment into a part of region already hurting before May 14, when a racist mass shooting at a Tops market on Jefferson Avenue claimed the lives of 10 people and injured three others. It also closed the lone full-service grocery store in surrounding neighborhoods for nine weeks.

Majid and other convenient store owners who are part of the Buffalo Arab-American Business Association were among those who sprang into action. They helped provide food and water from stands in the Tops parking lot, held cookouts outside their own stores and, if they were working with Bass, continued efforts to provide Health Bucks coupons and prepare their stores for renovations and food displays.

That support included more refrigeration space for businesses that work on thin margins.

“We're also working with locations outside of the stores” to help provide nutrition education, Bass said, including libraries, community centers and the YMCA.

Convenient stores have become places to buy food, phones and other goods, cash checks, get take-out and attend community events. Owners and workers – especially those who live in the neighborhoods they serve – understand the joys and challenges of their customers.

“Almost everybody lost somebody from the pandemic,” said Majid, who had a cousin with diabetes in his 30s, two uncles and a grandmother die from Covid-19.

Becca Townsend of The Copy Store, matches two parts of a mural symbolizing healthy eating at Lucky's Food Mart.

It helps explain why Lucky’s now includes new decorative wallpaper behind a cooler stocked with Naked Juice, Fairlife Milk, salads, snacks, peppers, strawberries, apples and fresh pineapples.

“Everybody’s loving this,” Majid said.

It is also why he has asked the city to approve a 3,000-square-foot addition to his store to expand healthy food offerings.

Four more convenient stores plan to join the Healthy Corner Store Initiative this fall. Majid and other East Buffalo business owners hope the activity might spur more development.

This part of the city needs more banks, hardware stores and coffee shops, he said. Boutiques, healthy dining establishments and gyms. A pet store. A carwash.

But the condition of the streets and sidewalks, and concern about neighborhood safety, turn entrepreneurs away.

“We want to change all that, including the corner stores,” he said. “Help us bring this community back to life.”

From left, Peyton Hinterberger, Hannah Strassburg and Melissa Camp, students in the University at Buffalo clinical nutrition master’s program, offer nutrition tips to David Edmunds during a recent visit to the Tops Market on Jefferson Avenue in Buffalo. 

UB nutrition students help Tops

University at Buffalo nutrition students are among those looking to bring more community togetherness to the new Tops Market on Jefferson Avenue, which reopened July 15, two months after a racially motivated mass shooting.

The soon-to-be dietitians, from the clinical nutrition master’s program in the School of Public Health and Health Professions, offer free nutrition information and counseling, food samples and store tours.

“When community leaders reached out to Tops during the reopening planning stages and voiced their desires to offer the community more options, not only from an accessibility to healthier food options standpoint, but an educational one as well, we knew that partnering with UB would be ideal for our customers,” Matt Hamed, Tops director of pharmacy, said in a university news release.

Tops approached UB program director Nicole Klem, who asked three honor students to serve as coordinators.

UB volunteer participants examined store food shelves and created handouts and recipe cards to help shoppers make healthy choices.

“Obviously, it was very emotional coming here for the first time,” said Melissa Camp, a student coordinator along with Hannah Strassburg and Jessica Lewis. “I know a lot of the students sat in our cars just to take it all in before we came into the store. The community has been really positive and welcoming, especially Tops employees – they’re really excited to have us here.”

The students have been at the store four times in July and this month and return from 4 to 8 p.m. Tuesday and 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Aug. 26.

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Ali Majid, a Lucky's Food Mart employee and son of owner Lucky Majid, gifts grapes to longtime customer Sharon Wolfrum at the Sycamore Street convenience store, which participates in the Healthy Corner Store Initiative.

Lucky Majid, owner of Lucky's Food Mart, hopes the Healthy Corner Store Initiative spurs better health for his customers and more business opportunities for him and others in East Buffalo.

Becca Townsend, of The Copy Store, holds part of a mural symbolizing healthy eating as she receives input from Ed Helm at  Lucky's Food Mart as part the Healthy Corner Stone Initiative.

Trade Fair Food Market owner Adel Munassar, left, discusses healthy food options in 2018 in front of one of the "Fresh Fast Food" refrigerated cases at his East Delavan Avenue store with Sheila Bass, coordinator with the Healthy Corner Store Initiative. 

Becca Townsend of The Copy Store, matches two parts of a mural symbolizing healthy eating at Lucky's Food Mart.

From left, Peyton Hinterberger, Hannah Strassburg and Melissa Camp, students in the University at Buffalo clinical nutrition master’s program, offer nutrition tips to David Edmunds during a recent visit to the Tops Market on Jefferson Avenue in Buffalo. 

Michael Ball, vice president of community affairs with Highmark BCBS of WNY.

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