Small business alliance to hold health fair in Gilbert

Feb 19, 2010 — East Valley Tribune

Blake Herzog

Feb. 19, 2010 (McClatchy-Tribune Regional News delivered by Newstex) -- The leaders of the fast-growing Gilbert Small Business Alliance hope Saturday's Sense of Health fair will be its first in a line of special events in the community.

Lisa Rigler, president of the alliance, said this and other gatherings the group hopes to launch in the next few years, such as a hay-sculpting contest feeding off Gilbert's past as an agricultural center, will add to the Gilbert Days rodeo and parade and other festivities in town.

"It's not about a substitute of anything," she said. "Not everybody goes to rodeos, but everybody goes to something, and that brings the community together."

Sense of Health will be at a shopping center at Val Vista and Williams Field roads where the alliance has its office near a Sprouts grocery store. Exhibitors will run the wellness spectrum from conventional and modern to traditional and alternative. A mobile on-site mammography van will offer breast cancer screening and the Red Cross will have CPR demonstrations.

Gilbert Yoga will lead classes for kids, and the Southwest Institute of Healing Arts will have massage tables and information about its programs. The Phoenix Coyotes and Polar Ice will team up to provide youth hockey during the fair.

Dawn Fleming, who runs Energy Transformations Inc. out of her Chandler home, will offer mini-sessions of Reiki, the Japanese healing art she has studied since she says it helped her young daughter recover her vision in one eye after cataract surgery more than 20 years ago.

Fleming said she has only participated in a few similar events since she moved to the Valley four years ago, with the opportunities particularly dropping off as the economy soured.

"These are the exact people I'm trying to connect with, especially considering they're going into Sprouts, because those are the people who will be open to alternative therapies," Fleming said.

The alliance is working with consultant Kate Hastings, managing director of the Tempe Festival of the Arts, for its venture into special events. Rigler said the next effort will probably be a slow-foods festival, followed by a kinetics race and eventually the hay "burning," or sculpting, event.

CONTACT WRITER:

(480) 898-6816

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Sense of Health

When: 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday

Where: Spectrum Towne Center (parking lot in front of Sprouts Farmers Market), 2530 S. Val Vista Drive, Gilbert

Cost: Free admission

Details: Interactive health fair with booths from about 30 health care and wellnessrelated businesses, mobile on-site mammography van, food, entertainment, and more.

Information: www.gilbertsba.com or (480) 478-1128

Newstex ID: KRTB-0132-42206686