Founder Becca Stevens (below) sells Thistle Farms products in shops around the country.

Healing Body and Soul

Posted May 17, 2011

Jordan and Katie, two Thistle Farms employees set wicks for the candles.

BECAUSE THISTLE GROWS almost everywhere, you hardly notice the purple-flowering prickly weed until it becomes a nuisance. “Any place that anyone doesn’t care about, that’s where you find it,” says Becca Stevens, founder of Thistle Farms, a cottage industry bath and body product company based in Nashville. 

Each day the company’s 35 female employees slip on gloves, harvest the thistle, and mine the goodness from that weed to produce candles, lotions, balms, and body scrubs for the company. Thistle Farms currently makes 15-20 bath and body products in several different scents. In addition to an online shop, their lines are found in shops across the country, including six Whole Foods stores throughout Tennessee and Georgia.

The job extends beyond the 9 to 5 work day, though. It is one of the most significant parts of their recovery. The company is an extension of Magdalene, a residential program for women who, according to Becca, “have survived lives of violence and addiction.” The Magdalene program, a collection of six houses, provides ladies who are enrolled two years of housing, food, education, job training, therapy, and medical and dental benefits without charge. Thistle Farms, in turn, is the program’s social enterprise, and the women earn an income for themselves from their work there.

These 35 women are directly linked to the weed they work. “The thistle is symbolic for the marginalized people the world thinks are incapable of doing anything,” says general manager Holli Anglin. And that connection—the company name, the source for their products—is completely intentional. “If we can use the thistle, that means there is nothing in creation for us to leave behind,” she says. “We can use all of it.” 

Providing Sanctuary

Becca is an Episcopal priest and the chaplain of Vanderbilt University’s St. Augustine’s Chapel. Her father had been a priest, but she really never knew him, because he was killed by a drunk driver when she was five years old. “I was raised by a single mom,” she says. “So I know the stresses on women in economic hardships and the toll that takes. I grew up with a mother who completely reinvented herself.”

She says her mother’s example, as well as the same stirrings that caused her to become a priest, inspired her to start Magdalene. “The work you do as a priest is about healing and providing a sanctuary for people,” says Becca. “Once you start meeting people all over the country in prisons, jail, and on the streets, you meet yourself. It’s easy to have compassion for people when you can see yourself in them.”

Holli, who came on full-time with Thistle Farms after she volunteered through the Junior League, says their whole mission is about helping the women they serve to become financially stable. “In thistle farming, the world is our field.”

For more information about Thistle Farms, visit thistlefarms.org.

HOLLI ANGLIN is a Regions customer.

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