CAMAS — Although downtown Camas was bustling during January’s First Friday evening event, the mood was serene inside Jacquie Michelle Hill’s yoga studio.
Visitors greeted Hill in LiveWell’s plant-filled entryway, then headed to a back room where musicians were playing a keyboard and “musical saw.” The First Friday event encapsulated the type of wellness-focused, easily accessible event Hill had in mind when she first opened her downtown Camas yoga and fitness studio — then known as Body Bliss — in 2019.
“My intention is not just to have a yoga studio, but a space where people can come to find friends and connect to their community,” Hill said in 2019.
Just a few months later, the COVID-19 pandemic and public health restrictions threatened to destroy Hill’s dream of providing yoga and movement classes that the entire community — regardless of income, age and ability — could enjoy.
“We had our first classes here in May 2019,” Hill recalled. “Less than a year later the pandemic was here, and we had to halt all in-person classes for nine months. Then, for about three months, we could only have six people in the studio.”
As a small, limited liability corporation, Hill’s Body Bliss studio was last in line for much of the federal and statewide COVID-19 relief dollars that helped keep many businesses afloat, but Hill didn’t let that derail her focus.
In September 2020, following Black Lives Matter marches, Hill offered her Birch Street-facing studio space to several Black women entrepreneurs who hosted pop-up shops, including Helen Rose Skincare, Asiyah Rose Candles and Shoebox by Ki, and a line of women’s clothing and accessories. That month, Hill launched a community cookbook, which helped fund scholarships for people who wanted to attend Hill’s classes but couldn’t afford the cost, even with the sliding scale payment options Hill had offered since the start of the pandemic.
“We wanted to ensure that people who want to access our services can do so,” Hill said.
By 2021, Hill had changed the name of her studio to LiveWell Camas and had secured a highly competitive small business grant through Main Street America, a national program that helps revitalize historic downtown commercial districts. The grant was meant to help brick-and-mortar small businesses adapt to the COVID pandemic and prepare for their states’ various reopening phases. For Hill, however, the grant also opened another avenue for bringing wellness to the downtown Camas community. Hill set aside $3,000 from her Main Street America grant to start a community garden in downtown Camas.
In her grant proposal, Hill highlighted the need for community-oriented businesses like LiveWell to help those in need, especially during the pandemic.
“Even though the median income in Camas is quite high, there are many, many families that are struggling,” Hill said in 2021. “And I didn’t understand why we didn’t have more community gardens … so I thought, ‘I guess I’ll just make one.’ ”
The community garden, which today offers 30 garden plots, including three spaces that comply with Americans with Disabilities Act guidelines, altered Hill’s business model and led to the creation of EatWell Camas, a nonprofit arm of the business.
Through EatWell, Hill learned how to run a nonprofit, work with a board of directors and adhere to a different set of guiding principles that valued social good over profits.
She didn’t know it then, but this experience would prove crucial to Hill in the coming years.
Diagnosis, tough choice
By 2023, Hill had created a nice flow inside her LiveWell business and EatWell nonprofit. She had kept the sliding-scale model at LiveWell to help all community members — particularly the educators, veterans, first responders and youth Hill had focused on during her first years in business — afford LiveWell’s variety of in-person and online yoga and movement classes. Her “little warriors” classes for elementary school students were proving popular, and the community garden had taken off.
The LiveWell Camas owner had even managed to launch a now-annual block party in downtown Camas known as “Camas PRIDE: Live Your Best Life Block Party,” which is held each June, during Pride Month, to celebrate the local LGBTQ+ community.
Then, in May 2023, Hill received a breast cancer diagnosis that upended her life and made her reconsider her entire business model.
Hill underwent surgery to remove one of her breasts in July 2023. After the surgery, her doctors told Hill they had discovered cancer in two lymph nodes. Hill, 42, who had devoted her adult life to yoga and wellness, found herself thrust into a treatment plan punctuated by a particularly harsh form of chemotherapy known as “the fed devil” and more than two dozen radiation sessions.
“It was very rough, in many different ways,” Hill said.
She made her way through cancer treatment by focusing on healing. She even continued to teach yoga and movement classes at LiveWell. Then, in January 2024, Hill felt a familiar ache in her hips after finishing one of her yoga classes. She’d felt the pain during her two previous bouts with COVID, and worried that, despite taking preventative measures to avoid illness during her cancer treatment, she had again contracted the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
“I wasn’t feeling well so I took a shower and went to bed,” Hill recalled, noting that she had a low-grade fever when she went to bed that evening, but that her fever had spiked to 103 degrees during the middle of the night. She woke up in pain and called her doctor, who told her to go to the hospital.
She tested positive for COVID in the emergency room and spent a frightening night in the hospital. She began to seriously worry not only about her own health but about the future of the small business she had worked so hard to grow into a space that could improve her community and serve people who might not be able to afford other yoga-fitness studios in Southwest Washington.
“I started thinking, ‘What if the cancer comes back? What if I don’t make it? What are my choices?’ ” Hill said.
She saw three choices when it came to LiveWell. She could sell the business, but that risked opening up the downtown space to a new owner who may not continue LiveWell’s history of serving lower-income or differently abled residents. She could close the business, which would also result in a loss for the students who depended on LiveWell’s sliding-scale rates and online classes. Or she could follow the same model that had proven effective for EatWell Camas and turn LiveWell Camas into a nonprofit.
In July, Hill filed with the state of Washington to transfer LiveWell from a limited liability, for-profit business into a nonprofit business. In September, LiveWell Camas, along with Hill’s Little Warriors Yoga School, which offers summer camps for youth in kindergarten through fifth grades, earned federal 501(c)3 status. As a nonprofit organization, LiveWell is exempt from paying federal taxes and can collect donations and apply for grants. It focuses not on making a profit but on fulfilling its mission of providing affordable and accessible movement and wellness classes to the Camas community.
“Now we can fundraise and go out for grants,” Hill said.
And though Hill said “it has been rough” trying to weather the pandemic, a personal health crisis and increasing rent and utility costs, the new year and the new nonprofit status have restored her optimistic outlook.
“I feel more hopeful now than I have in a while,” Hill said.
