LiveWell Camas returns to roots with new nonprofit status

Downtown Camas is bustling on this chilly January Friday evening as shoppers seeking mystery-solving hints pop into dozens of small businesses participating in the Downtown Camas Association’s “CLUE” themed January 2025 First Friday event. But the mood is much more serene inside one downtown Camas building. Visitors have come to Jacquie Michelle Hill’s LiveWell Camas space on this first Friday of the new year to escape the hustle and bustle happening just outside the yoga and fitness studio’s doors. They greet Hill inside LiveWell’s plant-filled entryway, then head to a back room where local musicians playing a keyboard and “musical saw” create sounds meant to inspire and uplift community members who have gathered for LiveWell’s “First Friday Unplugged: Somatic Salon,” an event meant to offer, as Hill wrote on LiveWell’s community calendar, “a welcoming, inclusive space for all ages and abilities to connect, create and celebrate.” The somatic salon encapsulates the type of unique, 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 told The Post-Record in 2019, after moving her studio from Washougal to its current location at 417 N.E. Birch St., in the heart of downtown Camas. Just a few months later, the start of the COVID pandemic and the public health restrictions meant to slow the spread of the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) virus would threaten 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-relief dollars that helped keep many businesses afloat during those early days of the pandemic, but Hill didn’t let that derail her focus on providing wellness to the Camas community. In September 2020, following hundreds of Black Lives Matter marches demanding more police accountability and more focus on systemic racism in our nation’s institutions, Hill offered her Birch Street-facing studio space to several Black women entrepreneurs who hosted pop-up shops offering organic skincare (Helen Rose Skincare), locally made candles (Asiyah Rose Candles) and a line of women’s clothing and accessories (Shoebox by Ki). That same month, Hill launched a community cookbook that included many of her own vegan recipes as well as contributions from her yoga students and others in the Camas-Washougal community. Proceeds from cookbook sales funded scholarships for people who wanted to attend Hill’s yoga and fitness classes but couldn’t afford the cost, even with the sliding scale payment options Hill had offered since the start of the COVID 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 (ADA) guidelines, altered Hill’s business model and led to the creation of EatWell Camas, a non-profit 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. 'What if I don't make it?' A diagnosis and a 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 diagnosis that would upend her life and make her reconsider her entire business model. “I was diagnosed with invasive ductal carcinoma, stage 2B,” Hill said. “I had cancer in one of my milk ducts and it had spread outside the initial space.” 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 Red Devil” and more than two dozen radiation sessions. “It was very rough, in many different ways,” Hill said. But she was making her way through the cancer treatment with a focus 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 Fahrenheit during the middle of the night. She woke up in pain and called her doctor. “They were concerned I was having a reaction to the chemo, so they sent me to the (emergency department),” Hill said. She tested positive for COVID in the emergency room and spent a frightening night in the hospital and 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 members of the community; she could close the business, which would also result in a loss for LiveWell’s assortment of students who depended on the studio’s sliding-scale rates and the online classes Hill offered even after most yoga studios returned to in-person-only classes during the later years of the pandemic; or she could follow the same model that had proven effective for EatWell Camas and turn LiveWell Camas into a nonprofit. The nonprofit option, Hill said, would help her preserve “the mission and legacy” of the Birch Street space, which had housed Paul Cheeks’ Rushing Water Yoga studio before Hill moved into the space in 2019. Last 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, meaning the nonprofit organization is exempt from paying federal taxes, can collect donations and apply for grants and is required to focus 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, adding that she has already applied for a Camas-Washougal Community Chest grant that would help increase her scholarship offerings, expand summer camps for youth and purchase adaptive equipment that will make it easier for community members with disabilities to take part in LiveWell’s classes. Hill also is looking into Nike and Adidas grants for youth that could open up the possibility of providing free or inexpensive summer camps through her Little Warriors Yoga School. To help make ends meet, Hill has opened her studio space to private individuals who will sublease the space and offer everything from soundbaths and traditional Indian dance classes to a Lunar New Year festival. 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.

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