Epiphany Jordan, MPH, CPH, came to social marketing and public health in a circuitous fashion. After graduating from the University of Nevada Reno with a BA in print journalism, she decided she didn’t want to be a reporter, and moved to San Francisco instead. There she worked as a legal assistant, moonlighting as a cigarette girl when it was still legal to smoke in nightclubs. In 1994, she discovered Burning Man, and spent several years volunteering for the event, and building big art (The World’s Largest Etch-a-Sketch). She moved back to her hometown, Reno, in 1995, and began freelancing for the Reno News & Review as an advice columnist and feature writer.
A move to Austin, Texas in the early 2000s led her to two more careers, professional tarot reader and Airbnb hostess. She remodeled her guest house, turning it into a beautiful temple, complete with a 25-square-foot mosaic mural and large metal tree sculpture. In 2013 she opened Karuna Sessions, a hands-on business that offered ritualized platonic touch, and began researching the psychological, physiological, anthropological, cultural, developmental and neurological aspects of touch. She realized that many people who might want her services couldn’t afford it, and in 2019 she published Somebody Hold Me: The Single Person’s Guide to Nurturing Human Touch. She also spoke at the South By Southwest Interactive festival that year about addressing loneliness with human touch, and has discussed touch on many podcasts. Her mission is to rebrand human touch and make it more accessible and inclusive for the millions of Americans who suffer from touch starvation.
During the pandemic, Karuna Sessions shut down. Epiphany began dreaming about creating public-health programs that would use platonic touch as a wellness practice and applied to grad schools. She was accepted into the University of South Florida’s Social Marketing program, the only accredited social marketing graduate program in the world. Public health was a different way of looking at the world for her, and Epiphany immersed herself into the world of health disparities, data analysis and the complex webs of health and poverty. With her social-marketing program, she discovered that combining excellent writing skills, empathy, big-picture thinking and an artistic perspective with science, data and systems is something that she enjoys and does well. She is excited to bring the social marketing process to governmental entities, academic institutions, and non-profits to create better health outcomes for populations with multiple health disparities.