Eden BrightSpirit Hendrix helps connect food producers, consumers

Meeting Eden BrightSpirit Hendrix for the first time, it’s hard to immediately tell if she is the spokesperson for a finely crafted marketing machine, or if she’s the real deal. Her infectious personality and enthusiasm immediately draw you into listening and believing every word she says about the importance of locally-grown organic foods. Before you know it, you find yourself wanting to eat local and organic foods with every meal. After learning about Fresh Abundance, Hendrixs’ organic, locally-grown food distribution network and retail operation, you may even conclude that the 46-year-old auburn-haired child of the 1960s is, really is the realest deal. At 17, Hendrix escaped a lower-income area of Detroit and made her way west, eventually finding herself in Spokane. Amazed by the surrounding nature and seeming endless landscape, as she puts it, “WOW! This is clean! This is great! I’m not leaving!” Now, she’s focused on the growth of Fresh Abundance along with the goals of making a modest, meaningful living for herself and her family, while still maintaining her ecological ideals. If that’s not enough, she’s hoping for the day that locally-grown food is available for every house in the area. How did you get started in Spokane’s local food movement? I founded PEACH (People for Environmental Action and Community Health) in August 2000 and it has worked on various toxic and pesticide issues and has evolved into working specifically on food. We have a certification program which certifies farmers as Local Safe within 200 miles of Spokane and, as of this year, for the first time ever, we own farm land, so we are going into farming now. We’re mapping out a program where we will be training apprentices as farmers and matching them with land. I get calls every week from people saying they have land that has never been sprayed, and they would love to be able to have it be used to grow food. The goal is to get a pool of a tractors and implements that can be shared between these different people, and they will constantly have a mentor watching over them, so all they need to do is grow the food and they will be successful. This is the goal over the next 10 years. How did Fresh Abundance get started from there? For the first four years of the nonprofit, I spent my time grant-writing and fund raising, and I felt like I was spending a lot of my time doing this instead of doing my work that I’m really passionate about. So I wanted to create a way to make money so I could do that work. Because I was already an organic farmer, and had already been in food distribution and all the marketing and started the Tolstoy CSA, I was able to put these things together and go into the food business and create a market for local farmers, who we’re trying to take care of and support, and create a fundraising arm for the non-profit. Four years ago, I started the box program by borrowing $1,000 from a friend. I used $300 for the incorporation and the rest for inventory and then just bootstrapped it from there. There’s no bank financing. Any investment is from members, and I am paying those people back a fair return on their money. I’m really happy to be putting money in these peoples’ pockets, because they are part of the Fresh Abundance family. Money is so attached to greed in our culture, so in order to keep it from being attached to greed, you need to put these barriers in place. How did all of this lead to the store on North Division this July? When I looked at putting the Division store together, having spent my whole life as an activist, I felt like I was grinding - all this passion and not really getting anything done. I’d get little victories, but I woke up one day and said ’Why am I not using what everybody recognizes as what works?’ What do people recognize? They recognize money and they recognize a storefront business. I have been down on corporations for years, and I realized that it’s not the corporations that I’m down on. It’s how they use their money that I have issues with. So why not use that structure, because it’s so damn successful, it’s recognized, it’s set up to success in the US, but do good with the money. For me, this was one of the smartest choices I’ve made in my entire life. We have no stockholders, the executives never make more that three times living wage and we pay our workers an actual living wage and we pay our farmers well – it’s about how you move the money around that makes the difference. Other than the fresh, local food, what are you doing with the new store? Because I was impoverished all my life, the first thing I did was implement a food stamp program. So people who are on food stamps get a membership at no cost and they use 20 percent of everything they buy. We also have a packing operation for the vegetable boxes we distribute to subscribers, so we are pulling out fruits and vegetables that are completely edible, but may not be visually perfect, and we give them to our employees or people who need them. What is the key to people realizing the importance of environmental responsibility? You can’t reach people with negativity. You can reach them once, and they’ll hear the message, feel guilty and act upon it once. You have to use something positive that they can wrap themselves around and that they feel good about to begin to reach them on a deeper level.