Buy local from Sundance: Individuals nourishing community nourishing individuals

Brisket (50501): Hello Eugene. This is Brisket, your friendly neighborhood activist urging you to support one of your local grocers.

Presenter: From the protest group 50501, your friendly neighborhood activist Brisket is boycotting the billionaire-owned and Amazon-affiliated food store Whole Foods. Brisket has been asking why it’s so important to support local producers and distributors, and recently visited with David ResSeguie at Sundance. 

David ResSeguie (Sundance Natural Foods): There’s a lot of value to be had from independent businesses, local businesses, keeping money local. That’s why we tend to focus on that at Sundance. We try to encourage small vendors who are just starting out and we’ll give them the space that they may not deserve in terms of sales, just give them exposure and to give them a chance to succeed.

We are distributors and we—whenever we can—tend to try to focus on local growers of bulk foods, local growers of produce. We do a lot of direct purchasing from growers at Sundance and in fact the Organically Grown Company actually started out on the back deck of Sundance by seven farmers coming together and saying, ‘Hey, we need a way to distribute our goods more practically.’ 

And so they started Organically Grown Co-op, which it was called at the time, and, you know, developed it into a very large, robust natural foods produce organization. But it really did actually start as, you know, seven farmers on the back dock at Sundance. 

When I first started at Sundance, I came on in 1985, we were having identity struggles and really questioning what the heck we were doing. And the staff came together and came up with the motto of ‘Individuals nourishing community nourishing individuals.‘

And that has really been our guiding mission is that we’re individual people and we have our own individual needs, but we come together to nourish community, and community nourishes us in return. 

So: ‘Individuals, nourishing community, nourishing individuals.’ That’s basically been our way of making it through the world for at least the 40 years that I’ve been here. 

Way back in 1971, there was a physics professor who used to work for NASA who decided he wanted to be into whole foods. And because there was no place to do that, he decided to start his own store.

So back in 1971, it was Bob Crolene and his partner that started this little store and it took up really about a fourth of this building. This building had a laundromat in it and then had a little natural food store and then for a while had a little produce store that was its own separate store and then down at the end is where the Down to Earth, another semi-famous natural organization here in Eugene, and so they actually started back on the west end of our building.

And then Sundance just slowly matured and then in 1983, Gavin McComas and his family bought into the store. And then, 1985, I started out as a weekend janitor and then got to be a cashier for a while and then ran the cashier pool and ended up writing a newsletter for the store. 

For about five years, I wrote a newsletter that allowed me to do a lot of research on food, food politics, whole foods, the nature of foods, our food system here in the United States—facts like that the average piece of food travels 1,500 miles before it gets into somebody’s mouth.

And so that gave us a good understanding of why we wanted to focus on local foods and local farmers and local vendors and whole foods. 

Sundance was owned until 2023 by a single person, Gavin McComas. So it was not a co-op in any way. It was a collaboratively-run business, but was owned by a single person. In 2023, in October, we decided to turn it into a perpetual purpose trust. So Gavin took his shares of Sundance and donated them to this perpetual purpose trust. And so it’s basically, it’s owned by itself. It can’t be sold. It’s going to be a community asset in perpetuity.

And it now has what we call this Trust Stewards Council, which is like a board of directors, and they just make sure to guide the business in the directions that adhere to the store’s values.

And we’ve dialed in the store’s values of having to do with reciprocity, like the Golden Rule;  geborgenheit, making the place a homey-feeling place, where people feel like they’re comfortable and can interact with each other in a non-alienating way, basically.

And then camaraderie is one of our other values that we decided we really want to make sure that all the people that work here and all the people that come here feel comfortable with each other and feel like they’re part of a team, part of a community.

And then our last overarching value at Sundance is something we call eudaimonia, which is a big Greek word that just means working for the greater good—when your actions that engender happiness inside you come out of the fact that you know you’re part of a bigger whole and that you’re working for something bigger than you.

We are trying to make sure that Sundance sticks with these values and has that as their guiding principles really into the far future, regardless of which individual humans are helping the store get along.

It’s a nice 15-page document, right? The perpetual purpose trust.

The natural produce distributor, Organically Grown Company, had just gone through a similar process. And they had several people on staff that really understood the process of turning yourself into a perpetual purpose trust.

Back when they did it, there wasn’t any law in Oregon for doing that, so they had to actually turn themselves into a perpetual purpose trust, like, under Delaware law, or something like that.

But by the time Sundance decided to do it, because of the work of Organically Grown Co-op and some wonderful law professors at U of O, our Oregon legislature had passed a perpetual purpose trust law in 2019, so by the time we got around to turning ourselves into a trust, there was actually a structure in Oregon for us to work with.

We definitely sit on the shoulders of giants like Organically Grown Company, which, you know, just did amazing work. They basically had to build the road and then walk down it, you know, in order to make themselves a similar kind of organization, one that is for the community, you know. I think they’re called purpose-driven is what they call themselves.

And then we’ve had other companies in Eugene follow the same thing, Hummingbird Wholesale, a natural foods wholesaler here in Eugene has also turned themselves into a perpetual purpose trust.

I just have to give a hearty thank you to the thousands of people who come and say good things about Sundance and bring their dollars here, and acknowledge the work that we’re trying to do here to, you know, be individuals nourishing community and basically provide whole foods for the people. So, thank you. 

Presenter: Your friendly neighborhood activist Brisket visits with David ResSeguie at Sundance—the store that owns itself as a perpetual purpose trust to carry out its mission of ‘individuals nourishing community nourishing individuals.’

Field recordings by Todd Boyle for KEPW News. You can view the entire interview on Todd’s YouTube channel.