Zepp Wellness is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization founded in 2019 by Raquel Savage, a Black queer sex worker and therapist, that centers the mental health and healing needs of Black queer folks, survivors and sex workers. All services are online and free to the community including mental health coaching, a monthly sex worker support group, Run Me My Coin (a fund for Black trans women sex workers), a monthly sex worker therapist support group, the Equitable Care Certification (ECC), an AASECT-approved training program for mental health professionals to provide unbiased care to their sex worker and marginalized clients.

I remember standing outside the door to my grandfather’s study when I was little.  A chaotic and cozy room in my grandparent’s basement that served as many things to him. Full of lectures, sermons, and books piled everywhere there was a surface that could hold them. It smelled like a library. Whispers and knowledge and old artifacts. It smelled like him, too. Woody and warm, a safe place to land. And often like peanut butter because, at any given time, he might have just finished a bowl of ice cream with that as a topping.

His presences was celestial to me. I believed he knew everything, could do anything, be anything. Divinity. He took up space, it was impossible not to be pulled into his atmosphere. There he was, always prepared to offer insight or, more often, to ask the right kinds of questions to nudge you toward deeper curiosity. He was provoking in the best sense of the word. But he could also sit in a room with you in silence, give you a look, a hug, expand his energy to surround you, hold you. Everything would be fine.

Everything that I am is because of him.

In vocation he was a minister, a teacher, a writer. And still, so much more. He studied theology in his youth and spent a summer studying Christian-Marxist dialogue. He was a professor of religious studies and taboo topics like human sexuality, death & racism, Malcolm X, and the culture & religion of Islam.