Flourishing Through a Pandemic

We are Nick and Brandie Scott, the owners and founders of Flourish Plant-Based Eatery. We started our journey with Flourish over 4 years ago. It started as a far fetched conversation on the road after eating at a raw vegan restaurant and eventually to a spark of drive and passion. We are passionate environmental, human, and animal rights activists. We wanted to create a concept unlike any other in our area. We wanted to create a business that focused on sustainability, animal rights, sourcing locally, inclusion, community health and giving back, so we created Flourish. However, Flourish didn’t happen over night. We were inexperienced with only a few years of kitchen experience under our belts. We knew we needed to educate ourselves in order to be successful. We went to school!! We both enrolled in and PASSED business management, culinary and nutrition courses. We became educated and certified in every aspect of our dream. This ultimately made us more effective activists and business owners. The next step was to see if this was an option Evansville even wanted. We formed an LLC and became approved by the health department. We did a series of pop-up events that received overwhelming support! At that point, we found a building! Being rejected for funding by every single bank, we drained our savings and self-funded Flourish! We unexpectedly found out that we were EXPECTING! A baby and a business in the same year! We got to work. Doing much of the construction ourselves, we were set to open our doors towards the end of March. We trained our staff and fine tuned our operations. We were ready! We scheduled our soft opening..........
And then.....Covid happened.....
We had to cancel our soft opening. Everything we had spent years preparing for shattered in front of us. We couldn’t open our dining room. Our projections in our business plan hadn’t accounted for a global pandemic. We persevered. We continued to learn. We continued to adapt. We altered our service style. The first round of aid became available and we were ready! We applied and were hopeful, only to be denied because we were new. We persevered again and we’ve been doing so since. We won “Best New Restaurant” in the Courier and Press Readers Choice Awards! We were hopeful for this next round of aid. We attended webinars and watched our calendars. Today, we learned that we, again, would not be eligible. We are still too new....almost a year later. Covid is all Flourish has known. We have grown in this pandemic but we fear that if we do not receive aid of some sort, our time will be limited. We are a family of 4, us and our two little girls. We employ simply amazing individuals who depend on us for paychecks. We feel as though we have something very special to offer to our community. We don’t want to lose that. We want you, our employees, our children, the animals and our planet to continue to Flourish. Donating to our cause will help pay our rent, ensure our employees continue to have employment, allow us to continue providing plant-based options to our community, give a larger voice to animals in factory farms, give individuals in our community a safe space to be themselves and allow us to continue to live our dream.
Thank you for believing in us and supporting us.
We promise to continue to give back in every way we can. ♥️