Two health and wellness professionals are launching a new event that focuses on love as a new way of helping individuals in the Washington D.C. area.
The Black Love Industry Professionals, or BLIP, Association’s Love Salon, scheduled for Nov. 11 in Northwest D.C., will teach attendees that the word love has everything to do with an individual’s overall well-being. The BLIP Love Salon, hosted by founders Gee Sanders-Spriggs and Paul C. Burnson, will include talks from industry professionals from across the United States to help attendees understand opportunities to improve their total wellness.
“The event is a salon, and it’s intended to ignite the conversation and stimulate thoughts on making a social impact into the lives of others who we feel like might be the lost population, who are either, not aware of these progressive services, or unable to access them, for different reasons, whether because of income, location, or again, just awareness,” said Sanders-Spriggs, an eight-year veteran of the matchmaking and dating industry.
The founders said they chose D.C. to host their inaugural event because of the opportunities available. The event will include talks from relationship experts, including Stacii Jae Johnson, Tanya Barnett, Shelly SaysSo, Rick Davis, and Richard Howard with his husband Dedrick.
“We know that there’s a wealth of experience from so many licensed professionals, educated professionals, so many people with 10,000 hours of experience, so we wanted to just use it as a launching pad to start off with D.C.,” Sanders-Spriggs said.
For BLIP, all of the various wellness practitioners are considered “Love Professionals.”
“If your work impacts the lives of others, then you are ultimately a Love Professional,” said Sanders-Spriggs said.
The Love Salon is slated to bring together different wellness practitioners and is teaming up with two non-profit organizations, The General’s Future Charity in Seat Pleasant, Md. and Sidewalk Talk, a national community listening project.
“Both are doing great things,” Sanders-Spriggs said. “So you’ll have an opportunity to interface with some community activists that are impacting well-beings for children and families in this local area.”
The BLIP Association already has plans of expanding the Love Salon events beyond D.C.,
“We do hope that the Love Salon begins to spread throughout the country. This is the inaugural but we’re hoping to set a tone for where we’ll be in 2018,” Sanders-Spriggs said.
BLIP hopes to spread its wings to reach minorities throughout the country and raise awareness of the importance of overall wellness and seeking the help of “love professionals” of all types.
“We definitely want to alert individuals of more progressive means of impacting well being, but we also want to raise awareness of the issue,” Sanders-Spriggs said. “In our community, being of a proud lineage, African Americans, in particular, definitely are not comfortable to sometimes seeking mental health services the labeling or the criticism. Maybe you don’t want to say substance abuse counselor, but if you say Love Professional, maybe someone in our community will feel more comfortable with such services and not feel, critiqued or judged.”