GARCIA Josi

Josi Garcia had worked in mental and behavioral health for many years before deciding in 2017 to open a practice of her own. “I really wanted to be a wellness group for anyone, not just someone who’s experiencing a mental health diagnosis,” she says. “You don’t need a label for someone to feel like they’re struggling with their behaviors or with their wellness.”

ZimZum Consulting, which is based in Emmaus, takes its name from a Hebrew word, which Garcia defines as “the energy between two driving forces to create something new.” It’s an accurate summation of how she and her team conduct business; ZimZum promotes a holistic, collaborative approach to achieving emotional wellness.

Garcia, a native of Brazil, says she has her own trauma story dating back to her childhood. “Working through some of that in my own life formulated this idea that I have something to share, something to give others. Helping people has always been a passion.”

She’s been a board-certified behavior analyst (BCBA) since

2007. The holistic approach she favors can be tailored to tackle any number of challenges. “We’re really looking at functionally how to adjust behaviors,” says Garcia. ZimZum offers traditional one-on-one counseling services as well as classroom consultations for teachers and schools, behavior therapy (including ABA therapy for children with special needs) and family and marriage counseling. Yoga is one of its more recent additions. “The mind-body experience is very important,” Garcia says. “We can’t miss what’s happening in our bodies and being more connected to our bodies.”

ZimZum’s clientele runs the gamut, from those seeking to stop (or start) a particular habit, to survivors of human trafficking. “My brain has to shift pretty quickly,” Garcia says. And yet, regardless of the scope of the trauma, many of the same issues are often at play, such as fear, anxiety and a lack of self-worth. “I think it helps to highlight that at the end of the day we’re all human beings, and we need help, we need support,” Garcia says. “We need to feel like we’re loved.”

For the past five years, physician assistant Nani Cuadrado put her skills to use wherever they were needed in the Lehigh Valley: under bridges, inside soup kitchens or within homeless encampments and tent cities. If an unhoused person needed medical care, she was there. Recently she decided to step away from her role as director of Valley Health Partners’ street medicine program to embrace what she calls a new season in her life as the director of education for HEAL (Health, Education, Advocacy, Linking) Trafficking.

It’s somewhat of a full-circle moment for Cuadrado, who’s been advocating for human trafficking victims for more than a decade. She says a discussion at her church in 2012 opened her eyes to the fact that trafficking is a very real problem in the Lehigh Valley. At that point, she had been working in the emergency department for several years, but had no training in recognizing the signs of human trafficking.

“I didn’t even know what I was looking for,” she says.

“I realized in all the years that I’d been [practicing], how many people I probably missed.”