At Mount Carmel Missionary Baptist Church, Ms. Jones told the woman who runs the food pantry how much they produced last year, and the woman wrapped her arm around Ms. Jones.

“Hey, hey! We could use your help,” the woman said.

Ms. Jones was excited and she discussed a plan to provide food for the pantry or encourage community members to come by the farm to get some. “It’s going to be great,” Ms. Jones said. “In the neighborhood, it’s all about love.”

But when Ms. Jones returned to Mount Carmel later that day to speak with the pastor, the Rev. Marvin R. Youmans, he was cautious.

Dr. Youmans, who lives in the suburbs but has been doing community work in the North End since 1977, remembers plenty of promises from foundations and the government that yielded no lasting good. He remembers the uneasiness that floated about the community when the farm volunteers first came there two years ago, without consulting residents, who asked who they were and how they got their land. The farming initiative still had work to do, Dr. Youmans concluded, to convince residents that it would be a force of good for the community.

“People have been doing things on the North End for years and years and years, and nobody knows about it,” Dr. Youmans said. The residents, he added, are “skeptical of people because they have not reaped the benefits.”

There was a time when Inell Byrd felt as if people were trying to take advantage of her. That was last year, when, overwhelmed by her family’s precarious finances, she put her home up for sale for $100,000. But after getting only lowball offers mostly from white buyers, she said, she decided not to sell.

But this is a city whose mammoth struggles are an inherent part of one’s daily life, and for Ms. Byrd this means ambivalence. One morning in late March, with dawn about to break, she slipped into her warm Chevy Malibu, ready to transport herself to a different world. She closed her eyes, whispered a prayer and cranked up the Yolanda Adams morning gospel show on the radio. Then she was off to her job helping an elderly couple in West Bloomfield, a suburb of strip malls and office parks. The trip provided a seductive glimpse of what else was out there.