A Letter From our Saffron & Sage Leadership

Saffron & Sage Community,

Our team has been outraged, devastated and in mourning the past two weeks following the murder of George Floyd and the brutal response from law enforcement. As the nation and our community fights for his justice, along with the countless other black lives senselessly taken, these recent events are nothing more than an echo of the inequality the black community and people of color have been experiencing for generations.

At Saffron & Sage, we have been committed to opposing social injustice and its effects through a lens of wellness since our doors opened. We are founded on the belief that every human life is valuable. We believe every person possesses the capacity for resilience and that the environment in which we call home can be renewed. We believe that, even though we are surrounded by disease and darkness, light can, and will, make its passage through.  

As the founder of Saffron & Sage, and speaking on behalf of our leadership, I understand it is a privilege to be educating ourselves about racism, rather than experiencing it firsthand. As an organization whose core values are centered around community and integrity, we would like to share the steps we have taken to responsibly steward our position of power as a small business in the community and invite you to join:

As a staff, we are reading All About Love by bell hooks, which you can purchase here. The ideas in this book align closely with our approach to providing a space for others to connect and heal. Written from the perspective of a feminist black woman and activist, it teaches what it means to pair love with action within our relationships and community. Our world needs love more than ever, and we need to challenge our definition of what it means to love and serve others. This book is a great starting point to a series of literature that addresses systemic racism.

Attending a training with Chrissy King: Anti-racism for Wellness Professionals. In this course, the Saffron & Sage team will examine white supremacy, racism and bias in our own lives and how we have been complicit. We will learn how to actively hold ourselves accountable for making space that demands justice for all bodies, leveraging our privilege to create actual change within the wellness industry. In this course, we will gain resources to educate ourselves on the intersection of racism and wellness. And most importantly, how we can all show up better and embody anti-racism practices year-round. 

Engaging with Diversity, Allyship and Privilege workbooks from Dive-In Well.

Implementing classes, workshops and lectures in our Virtual Library that include women of color providing tangible tools to combat the mental health issues, such as PTSD, activate the parasympathetic nervous system when living life plagued by fear, anxiety and stress, clear the body and subconscious mind of trauma, and provide positive tools for being an ally and anti-racist for the white community.

As members of the wellness community, we recognize more than ever that no single person can truly be “well” in a world sick with injustice, discrimination and violence.

We acknowledge that being a practice dedicated to providing safe space for health and healing is entirely in vain if we don’t look at the root of the problem. Systemic racism is a disease. It is an illness that infects the mind, body and soul of our collective community.

We will continue to fight the illness of injustice through the lens of wellness. To us, wellness is education. Wellness is anti-racism. Wellness is diversity. Wellness is allyship.  

We accept and understand we cannot change the world immediately, but there is no moving forward without the first step. This is not our first step, and it certainly won’t be our last. We may stumble along the way, but are committed to healing what is sick, fighting to fix what is broken and uniting firmly with those dedicated to ridding the world of the toxic, limiting beliefs that perpetuate injustice and oppression.