Donor Profile: Carolyn Jensen
AIM Donor Profile – Carolyn Jensen, GatherWeekly
Monday, December 16, 2024
Carolyn Jensen has been shopping at the Marin farmers market since 1997 and sharing her colorful produce hauls and delicious market-inspired meals on Instagram under the handle GatherWeekly for over 9 years. She’s always had a passion for delicious food—“I grew up in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, and after church I always begged my mom to go to the local farmstand because their corn was the best corn I’d ever had,” Carolyn recalls, —but it was a health issue that led her to get serious about nutritious, local food.
It started in 1993.
“I was getting married and we were under a lot of stress, beyond the typical wedding stress, and I broke out with a really bad case of eczema. I went to several doctors and for about a year and a half nothing helped. It was western medicine—you know, topical steroid after topical steroid. And nothing worked. I just kept living in pain with it for a while.”
After hearing Dr. Andrew Weil, an integrated medicine specialist, speak on a radio talk show, Carolyn went to the library and looked him up. While reading one of his books, she stumbled across an eczema remedy—one that didn’t include topical steroids.
For eight weeks, she avoided dairy completely and took blackcurrant oil capsules.
“In eight weeks, I woke up and boom, it was gone.”
This sent Carolyn off on a new adventure—she researched Andrew Weil and went full in on his whole food, organic ingredients, seasonal eating, and integrated medicine approach to life.
These days, Carolyn is a farmers market regular—“My friends and I call it our church, we’re the Church Ladies”—and a champion of local food. She brought her kids to the market, taught them about seasonal eating, and encouraged them to get to know the faces behind the food they ate every day. Forging the connection between the land, her food, and the people who farm it is important to her.
“When food is prepackaged and uniform, we lose our connection to it, and it becomes impersonal and sterile.”
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Carolyn had been eating local, organic produce for years when she started GatherWeekly.
“I had a personal Instagram account and I was looking at my feed and it was all food. I just kept posting food and food and food. I thought, I want my personal account to be separate from the food and I also wanted to just play with it. It was a creative outlet. You know, my friends weren’t shopping at the market, and I thought, how can I inspire people to go to the farmers market?”
What started as a creative project designed to inspire her friends to attend the market has grown into an influential account with a robust community of people who are passionate about local food and farmers markets.
Recently, Carolyn supported AIM’s Giving Tuesday campaign through videos posted on her GatherWeekly Instagram account. Farmers joyfully participated in her Market reels encouraging people to forgo a Cyber Monday purchase in favor of a donation to the market. She created a sign on butcher paper whose message was slowly revealed as she took colorful winter greens and squash off the paper. Her support and advocacy of AIM’s Giving Tuesday campaign helped AIM successfully meet a $2,500 challenge match.
Carolyn has been a supporter of AIM for years—donating not only her money, but also her time, her talent, and sharing her network of friends and GatherWeekly’s followers — and she was the first member of AIM’s monthly giving circle, Friends of the Market.
Looking to the future, she’s excited to become even more involved with AIM—she's joining the 2025 Gather for the Planet Host Committee and has big plans for GatherWeekly.
“I wanted a place to inspire, originally my friends, but really anyone who would listen. And I thought the way to do that was with food pictures. Now, 9 years later I realize I need to be out there more, telling people and giving information rather than just showing pretty food pictures.”