Hi, I’m Whitney and I’m the human behind Good Neighbors Mercantile. I’m a teacher, a trainer, a baker, and would love to live in a treehouse in the Yucatan someday. Food is my love language and my favorite memories in life are shared meals with wonderful humans. I grew up in Golden then moved our family to Leadville in 2022 for a change of pace (and to avoid I70 as often as possible).

Growing up, composting and using our canvas bags at the grocery store was normal life. I’ve never been a crunchy, granola type person, I just like making stuff! Excess consumption and waste never made sense to me. Why must everything be wrapped in layers upon layers of plastic that gets thrown away and will live in the landfill forever!?

I don’t believe in perfection. This journey to less waste shouldn’t be stressful and there is no ‘winning.’ We each have our own journey and the goal is simply to find little tiny swaps that make sense in our lives that reduce our dependence on single use plastics, the consumerism marketing machine, and the algorithm that tells us to buy buy buy.

Thanks for visiting my tiny corner of the world wide web. I hope you join me in this quest to be a good neighbor.