Telling Women's Lives

Gormley– Community Entrepreneur Profile: Lonnie Atkinson

Finding one’s passion is not always easy to do. However, as Lonnie Atkinson found, sometimes it has been there all along. You just need to know where to look.

Atkinson, a Winston-Salem native and mother of three, discovered her passion for healthy juices and foods while working as a photographer in California. But it took her mother’s cancer to bring her back to her hometown. Then with a bit of prodding from her husband and some help from local food advocates, Atkinson found a way to bring her dream to life. As founder and co-owner of Village Juice, she now draws cold-pressed juice fans from as far as High Point University, a half hour drive away, to her juice bar and cafe.

This wasn’t always her dream though. After graduating from Savannah College of Art and Design, she moved to California to pursue a career in photography with National Geographic.

“The work was pretty slow,” said Atkinson about her photography career. “I did some freelance stuff from weddings to bar mitzvahs to local magazines, but there was no job security and my heart wasn’t in it.”

To supplement her income, Atkinson first took up a part-time job as a sales representative for a shipping company. Her heart wasn’t in this either though, so she looked for something else that would be more enjoyable. Eventually, Atkinson decided to apply for a job at her favorite raw-vegan restaurant.

That’s where Atkinson discovered her passion for raw-vegan food. “I realized I wanted to be there everyday,” Atkinson said. “I would even get up early and stay up late at night reading books about the food.”

It didn’t take long for Atkinson to realize she had to make a change. “The thing you just can’t wait to do when you get off work, that’s your passion,” she said. With this revelation, she began to think about how she could make it into a career.

Shortly thereafter, in 2010, Atkinson’s mom was diagnosed with cancer and she flew home to be with her. While in Winston-Salem, she helped her mom recover by switching her diet to raw-vegan meals for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Within two weeks, Atkinson’s mother had lost 10 pounds that she had put on while in the hospital and her cholesterol dropped 100 points.

This further stoked Atkinson’s passion.

“Holy cow,” she said to herself. “This is real. This is not just a fad. You can really make a change in yourself just by what you put in your body.”

While home taking care of her mother, Atkinson met her husband-to-be. They soon got married and had a child, but Atkinson never let go of her dream.

Eventually, in mid-2014, her husband convinced her to give the business a shot.

She spent the next few months developing recipes, establishing a business plan, getting permits and licenses and creating her brand. She barely saw her family at all for the first six months. “When I first started, I remember having my baby strapped to my chest with carrots slices stuck all over her hair and in the ceiling” Atkinson said.

She then moved her operation to the beta-verde kitchen, a local industrial kitchen owned by a mother and daughter who rent it out to local foodstuff startups, including local startup UpDog Kombucha.

Social media was also important. She began growing the business by word of mouth and via her Facebook page. As word spread, the orders she received skyrocketed. For the first few months, customers could place orders on Sunday for delivery on Tuesday and on Wednesday for delivery on Friday. She then opened up a booth at Cobblestone Farmer’s Market, a local market which she ran by herself every Saturday.

Atkinson soon realized she needed help keeping up with demand. First, she enlisted her father and brother, who would help her squeeze fruits and vegetables into juices for 12 to 16 hours a day on weekends.

She also needed help on the administrative side. Although she retains full control of everything related to operations, creative development, recipes, and customer interfacing, there was still more to do.

She first partnered with her husband, who is an attorney in Winston-Salem. He handles business development and expansion. Next, they partnered with her husband’s best friend, who serves as chief financial officer. They then partnered with a third friend, who invested enough money to get the company on its feet.

With her support network in place, Atkinson was able to lease her current location on Stratford Road and grow it from a smoothie bar to a restaurant, featuring all sorts of healthy bowls, salads, toasts, and sandwiches.

“Super busy but still pretty laid back,” Atkinson said, describing the work environment at Village Juice. “We like to blast music and have fun.”

Meghan Grigspy, an international business major at Forsyth Technical Community College, is also a big fan of the friendly environment. Grigspy has been working with Village Juice for over a year now and is a “front of house leader.”

“I absolutely love working here. It’s the best job I’ve ever had,” Grigspy said. “Lonnie is the coolest boss ever and I love the girls I work with. It’s a great vibe everyday.”

Grigspy even seems to have fun working at Village Juice when things go wrong. “The worst part about working here is when we have keg explosions during rush times,” she said. “Kombucha goes everywhere, even on customers sometimes. We generally start to panic but it always turns into laughter.”

Store manager Arianna Ayuso, head store manager since last year, also loves working at Village Juice. She graduated in 2015 with a master’s degree from Wake Forest in sustainability. “I love working here,” Ayuso said. “It’s very hands on and we get to try new things.”

Ayuso had lots of praise for Atkinson’s innovation in starting her company in Winston-Salem and is proud to be part of a company that sources most of its produce from local farms, one of which Ayuso also works at herself; Fairshare Farm.

Although Winston-Salem was not where Atkinson had envisioned opening her first juice store and restaurant, she has since realized this tester site in a small market was exactly what she needed. She even surprised herself by the success they’ve had so far. “I knew it would completely bust or it would be awesome, we lucked out,” Atkinson said.

It wasn’t all Luck though. Atkinson also benefited from solid brand development and pop-culture trends of healthy eating. As Kathryn Hurd, a junior at Wake Forest University and Village Juice enthusiast, puts it, “I feel like Village Juice is the only place around to get fresh, local, and super healthy food.”

This seems to be a fairly common opinion considering Atkinson estimates 30% of her business comes from college students.

Although she wouldn’t give any details, Atkinson says there is certainly more to come from Village Juice. “There’s still lots of room for this company to grow,” Atkinson said. “Keep an eye out for us.”

Gormley: “Unfinished Business” Reader Response

One Issue raised in Unfinished Business that I found interesting was in part 2, chapter 6: “The next phase of the Women’s movement is a men’s movement.” I found this to be particularly interesting because I had never thought about the pro-feminism movement in regards to boys. It seems valid to point out that boys are generally not being brought up with the same amount of encouragement for different future life roles as women are. Where girls are now, increasingly, being brought up in a world where they are encouraged to do whatever it is they want to do, whether it be a stay at home mom or an engineer, boys are still being brought up under only masculine values for the most part. This section of the book pointed out that for equality to be achieved, boys and girls alike should be brought up with the same set of universal encouragement so that when these boys grow into adult men, they don’t hinder the progress of women by feeling as though they need to be the one that has a high paying and important job, even if they would rather be spending more time with their families. This cultural norm makes it harder for women to advance professionally if the men in their life have beliefs that they have to have a more important job and earn more money than their wives. If there was a cultural shift in which both boys and girls were brought up believing that having a big time corporate job or being an excellent stay at home parent are equally important, I think men and women would both be left in happier positions in which they can both serve the role they would prefer without any internal feelings if shortcoming and without any external societal pressures of the different roles in which men and women “should” serve.

Farmer Jane Reader Response- Andrew Gormley

Farmer Jane Reader Response: Jo Ann Baumgartner

Jo Ann Baumgartner is an author and the director of Wild Farm Alliance, an organization that works to bring biodiversity conservation to organic farming. She works with farmers to teach them methods that are significantly more friendly to the environment than the current standards and to change their practices and perspectives about how their farm can and should be interacting with the local ecosystem. As the article stated, “Jo Ann knows it’s possible to move the equation towards more on-farm self-sufficiency while preserving nature and enhancing the farm’s business.” I found Baumgartner to be particularly interesting because her organization serves many positive purposes. For one, she teaches farmers to preserve species by working with native animals and insects instead of killing them and destroying their habitats. In addition to the obvious benefit of preserving native species, this helps to keep the local ecosystem in check to avoid issues like a surge in rodent population, as often happens when larger predators are eliminated. Secondly, they save farmers money by teaching them to use their natural resources to protect their crops. For one, they establish nesting sites for predatory insects around the farm, which keep the population of invasive insects low and eliminates the need for pesticides. Additionally, she educates farmers on the benefit of using manure to fertilize crops rather than industrial fertilizers which can be detrimental to the environment. Thirdly, the resulting food is organic and natural and therefore healthier for humans to consume than it would have been had it been treated with pesticides and industrial fertilizers. As a result of Baumgartner’s work, essentially everyone and everything involved benefits, from the ecosystem, to the farmers and their families, to everyone consuming the food.

Andrew Gormley- Reader Response 3/21/17

Reader Response

One thing that I thought to be significant was the prevalence of implicit association, which most people seem to be wholly unaware of, just as I was before reading the assigned articles and watching the video. This is significant because people may truly believe themselves to be an equal and unbiased person, but actually foster subliminal beliefs that prove otherwise. I think it is important that more people, especially those in positions of power such as hiring managers, are made more aware of their potential of implicit association which could result in unfair decisions being made, potentially on a large scale, without anyone knowing that an element of unfairness or inequality had been present. My interest was piqued by the talk of the Harvard Project Implicit in the video, so I went to the website to take the test. The data from my results suggest that I have a “neutral automatic attitude toward Niffites,” however, my results may have been skewed given that I knew the intent of the study before participating in it. I would be very interested however to see how those in positions of power, without first knowing the objective of the study, would perform.

I would not be surprised to learn that many of those surveyed are in fact affected by the effects of implicit association, as Mahzarin Banaji suggested in the video. If this proved to be true, as it very well may, then I would suggest that the measures suggested in The Science of Equality: Volume 2 be more rigorously implemented. It is, however, valid to say that much is already being done in the work place to try to instill these changes, and has been for some time now, without significant improvement. I think this has much to do with men and people of certain ethnic groups being too quick to disregard these concerns of inequality. To address this, I think it is important to first make sure everyone is aware of and accepts the indisputable evidence of the existence of such inequalities and bias.’ This way, people will be less likely to wholly disregard such initiatives to achieve more fairness and equality and therefore, these initiatives will be more effective.

Gormley, Community Entrepreneur Profile: Lonnie Atkinson

Lonnie Atkinson is the founder and co-owner of Village Juice.

Andrew Gormley: NYTimes Profile- Shifa al-Qudsi

Shifa al-Qudsi was a would be suicide bomber on behalf of the Palestinians agains the Israelis until her attempt was thwarted. She has since had a change of heart and now advocates for palestinian-israli peace.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/29/world/middleeast/once-a-would-be-suicide-bomber-now-a-fighter-for-peace.html?_r=0

Andrew Gormley Student Leader Profile

I will be writing my Student Leader Profile on Georgia Thompson, a WFU student who has started and built her own successful jewelry business.