Healthy Creations - Ariel Bangs

Ariel Bangs - Interview Transcript

So my business is Healthy Creations. It's a healing food chef company, and so it's basically comprised of private chef services and meal planning, donuts. I make vegan gluten-free donuts. I'm a pastry chef by trade. When the pandemic happened, I immediately had to pivot, so there's no more cooking classes in person, there's no more chef services. And then now I have been learning how to market and how to get meal planning out to people and get donuts out to people that can be delivered with no contact but also can be shipped. As I was doing that, I was like there's a major need for people that need food because the people don't have jobs, if everything's shit down, you're not gonna be able to eat, and even though we have to be six feet away from each other, we can still check on each other and look out for each other and make sure everyone is safe and being protected and all of that. And so for me, I thought well, these boxes do that in the sense that you get prepared food in them to last you three or four days your family can eat on this food.

The boxes are called Plant-based Food Share, and they're basically a plant-based food box for people to come pick up every week. Come pick up Mondays between 12 and two at Cafe Red, which is our home right now. That's what we're doing every Monday from 12 to two. You have to sign up on our social media page, which is Plant-based Food Share, and that's on Facebook. You can also sign up on the Instagram one, which is the same. The whole focus behind the boxes is preparing food, having people have that, giving people fresh food that they can cook with their family for the week, and then giving people plants and soil and starts so that they would be able to then repeat that cycle just around growing their own food and being able to harvest their own food. And the goal with that is to just help people to understand that there's power in our hands and we can actually do things that will be able to help our families and help one another in the process.

And the more people have been reaching out to us, seeing this in other cities, we've been just letting people know this is how we're doing this, this is how you can do it, and then I just spend my time just reaching out for donations, connecting with partners and networks. I'm on the board of Hip Hop is Green, the African American Leadership Forum, and the African American Health Board, and so we're all focused on how do we help people, how do we help people, but how do we help people help each other but then also get people to understand that this is how you build communities, this is how people support each other, this is how we build up our morale because that's really what it's about.

So for us, these boxes do all of that, and it's been really great because we are getting donations, so we're able to support farm partners and local businesses where we can buy produce from them and then buy food from the small businesses to put in the boxes. So we're also trying to do economy building at the same time. I'm not working, and I'm blessed that my partner is an essential an employee in that I can be at home with my son and everything, but it's like we wanna really help people to just understand that there is power in our dollar in that we can support one another and we can help one another and that a lotta places are willing to do things in support of community. And so that's really where we're at with how do we do that, how do we connect those dots?

Over the past two months, I have been just trying to find soil donations because we just didn't have the donations to buy the food and buy the soil. And then our recent partnership that just happened last week with Beet Box. Beet Box is a children's gardening education program, and so they're pivoting, as well. So they partnered with us, so they're providing the soil, and then they're providing seeds and starts. So every week, people will be able to come in and get soil that's been donated by Beet Box, they'll be able to get starts that have been donated by Beet Box that we were able to buy through our donations, and then seeds that were donated by Seattle Tilth and Garden Hotline. And then they'll be able to get onto our page to learn how do you plant this, what does it need to look like, what do you need to do, how can you do this in your kitchen, then learning nutritional benefits around like why am I even growing kale?

So I could've went and said I'm just gonna work on my business, but that's not my nature. My nature is always of community and to help people because I just want people to know that they're loved and they're honored and they're respected and how important it is to be kind and that we can do this and we can help one another in the process. But if you're blessed and you're in a place where you're not stressed and you're not struggling like a lotta people are right now, that's your duty to do something in the community to help people. And I get it, being a business owner, and I went from making the amount of money I was to not making any, but I'm blessed because I have a home, my bills are paid, we have food on our table, our kids are straight and they're good and they're healthy. We're so thankful for that. So I have to give back because when you're blessed, you're supposed to give back. Our problem is that we're blessed and we don't give back and then wonder why life ends up hitting us with a curve ball later because you had an opportunity to help people and you didn't do it.

Through community, that's the way that we get the world being good again like it was for a lotta people. Now, the world's not been great for a lotta people, but it can be, and we're in a place now that if we understand that we're better together, then we could figure out better ways to support and help one another.