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Natural Awakenings Gulf Coast began in 2002 as the Mobile/Baldwin Edition, serving Mobile and Baldwin counties in Alabama. It brought the Natural Awakenings mission into a local setting, connecting readers with the people, businesses, practitioners and resources shaping healthier lives in their own communities.

In 2015, the magazine expanded into coastal Mississippi, adding Jackson, Harrison and Hancock counties. With that expansion came a new name, Natural Awakenings Gulf Coast, reflecting the larger community the magazine had grown to serve.

More than two decades later, the magazine continues to grow with that community. What began as a print publication now includes a digital edition, our website, an online wellness directory and the Natural Living Directory. Each gives readers another way to discover the people, ideas, businesses and resources around them.

But the pages are only part of the story.

A magazine can introduce you to a business you never knew existed, bring a new idea into your life, or help you discover a resource at exactly the right time. It can put two business owners in the same room who might never otherwise have met. Sometimes that introduction is all it takes for something else to happen.

That’s what we want to keep doing: opening doors, making introductions and creating places for people to find one another.

As Natural Awakenings Gulf Coast continues to grow, those connections will have more places to happen: on the page, online and eventually face-to-face across the Gulf Coast.

We can open the door, make the introduction and create the space. What grows from those connections is where the story gets interesting. And around here, we’re pretty curious about what happens next.

Meet The Publisher

Jyn Sage is the Publisher of Natural Awakenings Gulf Coast. Raised in Mississippi and now based in Alabama, she has spent the past several years getting to know the Gulf Coast from the ground level.

Before becoming Publisher, Jyn spent a year and a half distributing the magazine across Mobile, on foot and behind the wheel, in and out of the businesses that fill its pages. She talked with business owners about what they do and how they do it, and with readers about what they were looking for. More than once, that meant pointing someone toward a business she had known for years or one she had only just discovered herself. That experience gave her something no spreadsheet could: regular, face-to-face contact with the community the magazine serves.

Her path here has never been a straight line. She’s not even particularly good at drawing one. She has spent decades working in retail, marketing and production, along with print, web and photography, and she has built and run businesses of her own along the way. She has also taught English overseas while continuing her marketing work back home.

Her interest in health began 16 years ago. Living abroad opened her eyes to how little she knew about the food she was eating: how to read a label, what the ingredients actually meant, and what she was putting into her body every day. The people around her began teaching her, in small and practical ways, how to make more informed choices. What started as a wake-up call became a way of looking at the world that stayed with her.

Outside of work, Jyn is a woodworker, among other things. She has a particular fondness for the dead space in a house or business, the awkward corner everyone has learned to ignore, and an apparently irresistible urge to figure out what belongs there. She likes designing and building pieces specifically for the space they need to fill, which may say more about how her brain works than she would care to admit.

What’s Inside

Every issue of Natural Awakenings Gulf Coast brings together national perspective, expert insight and stories from the communities we serve. The subjects may change from month to month, but the purpose stays the same: to inform, to encourage curiosity and to give readers something useful to take with them.

Our national features explore a different subject each month, taking a closer look at the ideas, practices and conversations shaping how we understand health and the world around us. Wise Words brings authors and experts into thoughtful conversations about subjects that matter. Professional Pulse gives local credentialed practitioners space to share their knowledge and perspectives from within their own fields.

Our local sections bring the focus closer to home. Gulf Coast Green Living explores the people, places and ideas connected to a more sustainable Gulf Coast. Local Spotlight introduces readers to local businesses and the people behind them. Local Briefs is intentionally open-ended, giving us room to cover the many different kinds of stories, people, events and information that make up our communities. Keeping that space flexible means we’re not limited to one definition of what a local story should be. Kudos celebrates accomplishments worth recognizing, while Mark Your Calendar helps readers find what’s happening next.

Across the magazine, our goal is to create articles that are genuinely useful to readers while giving local businesses an opportunity to share the knowledge and experience behind what they do. We believe good editorial content should inform rather than simply promote, offering readers something they can understand, consider, question or carry with them.

Then there are the lighter moments. Quotes gives you something to stop and think about, smile at, or pass along. Our monthly Puzzle gives your brain something else to do for a little while.

For local businesses, Classifieds provides another way to connect with readers who are already looking for the products, services, jobs and opportunities featured there.

Not everything can fit into every print issue. There are only so many pages, after all. But every article we publish also lives on our website, giving readers another way to find the stories they may have missed in print, or come back to one they remember.

Our Impact

Every month, more than 12,000 copies of Natural Awakenings Gulf Coast make their way into the community through 650-plus distribution locations across five counties: Mobile and Baldwin in Alabama, along with Jackson, Harrison and Hancock in Mississippi.

That network is part of what makes the magazine local. Copies are placed in businesses and community locations people already know, giving readers the chance to discover a practitioner, business, event, idea or resource they may not have encountered otherwise.

A copy doesn’t necessarily stop with the first person who picks it up. Readers pass them along, leave them for someone else, and hopefully find something inside that keeps them reading.

Committed to Sustainability

We make deliberate choices about how the magazine is produced and what happens to it afterward. Natural Awakenings Gulf Coast is printed on partially recycled, fully recyclable newsprint using soy-based ink, so the magazine can be recycled when you’re finished with it.

We also try to keep usable copies in circulation for as long as possible. When a distributor has leftovers from one location, those copies can be moved to busier racks where they have another chance to find a reader. Once a copy has truly reached the end of its useful life, it can become garden mulch rather than simply being thrown away.

Our delivery bags serve a practical purpose, too. When a business is closed, we use standard plastic bags to protect the magazines from weather until they can be brought inside. Those bags can be recycled through normal small-plastics recycling. We looked into home-compostable bags, but we couldn’t quite pencil that option into the budget, so recyclable is where we’ve landed for now.

Sustainability isn’t about pretending every choice has a perfect solution. It’s about paying attention, reducing waste and making better choices where we can.