Real Change News | Vendor of the Week- Jennifer Adams

July 1, 2009
Vol: 16 No: 30

Vendor of the Week

Vendor of the Week- Jennifer Adams

by: Alex Becker , Real Change Intern & Contributing Writer

Photo by: Alex Becker , Real Change Intern & Contributing Writer

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“I’m a people person,” Jennifer Adams says.

Enough said. Because anyone who knows Jennifer will tell you: her laughter, kindheartedness, and unfettered altruism are contagious.

It probably has to do with the fact that she’s an artist. After all, since the age of 3 Jennifer has always been creating something: music, paintings, drawings, quilts — the list goes on. She plays violin, viola, cello, and stand-up bass, and stands proud that she was consistently the “first chair” in her school ensemble. She has a lot to be proud of.

Among other things, Jennifer also enjoys riding her bike. The thrill of coasting down hills and feeling the wind in your face offers a perfect accompaniment to her free-spirited persona. That feeling, however, was hampered by the accident.

“I was in the hospital for seven days,” Jennifer reflects. She remembers it like it was yesterday: riding her bike at the Woodland Park Zoo when a car unexpectedly backed up, throwing her off her saddle and onto the ground. She severely injured three of her lower lumbar vertebrae, and was hospitalized.

Having lost her job managing a storage facility a few months earlier, Jennifer didn’t have health care, not to mention the fact that she was struggling to pay the rent. And when the pain medication ran out, self-medication ensued.

Shortly thereafter she found Real Change: “I used to buy the paper when I was still working in the corporate world downtown…[so] I thought back to that,” she tells me. Three years later she’s still at it, selling throughout Ballard, Fremont, and Wallingford while working odd jobs on the side — mostly light landscaping, yard cleanup, and home cleaning (none of which are particularly easy on the back). But nonetheless, she’s persevering.

“I’m a forward thinker,” Jennifer says. “I can get myself out of a paper bag faster than anybody else… In fact, I could take the paper bag and figure out how to make it into something else.”

To her customers, she says: “Thank you for your support. Not just for me, but for all of us… I love everybody I meet, and I meet a lot of people.”

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