April is a month that carries more than one mandate. It is Minority Health Month — a time set aside to shine a light on the health disparities that disproportionately impact communities of color. It is also Financial Literacy Month — a national call to deepen our understanding of money, wealth-building, and economic self-determination. The conversations we typically hear during this month center on diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, and cancer. These are real, urgent, and necessary. But for Renee Webber, a Baltimore-based salon owner, entrepreneur, and RnD Sexual Health Ambassador, April’s twin designations are not a coincidence. They are a confirmation. Because health has never been a single conversation. It has always been a web — where your money, your relationships, your body, your trauma history, and your sense of self are all pulling on the same thread, at the same time, whether you realize it or not. “Don’t think that your money is different from your sexual health and your life,” she says with quiet conviction. “Everything is connected. When we see how it’s connected, we’ll have a better understanding of how to move in life and how to make decisions — to prosper.”
Renee’s path to becoming a sexual health ambassador is as layered as the work itself. A hairstylist and salon owner by trade, she first connected with RnD’s Rebkha through a storytelling initiative at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum — a gathering of healers that included natural doctors, nurses, a midwife, and Renee, who told the story of how hairstylists, too, are healers. That salon chair, she reminded the audience, is one of the most trusted spaces in the Black community. People share things there that they don’t share anywhere else. It is a place of transformation, yes — but also of confession, comfort, and care. That connection with Rebkha blossomed into a mentorship, and eventually into an invitation to join RnD’s sexual health initiative as an ambassador, bringing conversations about sexual wellness into the spaces Renee already occupied: her salon, her retreats, and her women’s organization.
That organization is the Queens’ Sisterhood Society, which Renee founded in 2018 after watching her community navigate financial hardship up close and firsthand. A teen mother who received $258 a month on welfare at 16, she understands viscerally what it means to live in survival mode — and what it costs a person over the long arc of a life. In the spirit of Financial Literacy Month, her story is a masterclass in what happens when a woman decides that financial ignorance is no longer an option. “I wanted to let my money work harder for me than I work for my money,” she says. The Queens, as the sisterhood is known, operates on three pillars: personal development, building wealth through pooled investment, and building sisterhood relationships. The wealth-building component is particularly intentional. Members pool their money and invest together, creating a model of collective financial power that mirrors the kind of community infrastructure that Black neighborhoods were historically denied. The Queens’ Sisterhood Society has expanded into real asset ownership, including hospitality investments in Georgia and Mississippi and multifamily property in East Baltimore—through a model of collective investment and shared learning. The organization is focused on continuing to grow its real estate portfolio over the next 12–24 months as it approaches its 10th anniversary.
It is in that third pillar — relationships — where sexual health has found its most natural and most necessary home. “When you build a relationship, that’s how you introduce sexual health,” Renee explains. At a Queens anniversary dinner — not a health fair, not a clinic, but a celebratory dinner — RnD’s Rebkha presented on what healthy relationships look like, framing the conversation through the eight dimensions of wellness. The setting was intentional. You meet people where they are. You create safety before you ask for vulnerability. And the response was immediate and deeply personal. One woman shared that she wished she had known this information sooner, after a partner’s infidelity exposed her to something she hadn’t anticipated and hadn’t been equipped to protect herself from. Even a server who overheard the conversation from the hallway asked if the presentation could be brought to his sorority. “They didn’t know,” Renee says simply, of the broader response. “A lot of people don’t know about the topics we discuss. It’s just not talked about anymore. We have to force the conversation.”
The connection between financial instability and sexual health risk is something Renee speaks about with both data and lived experience. Financial Literacy Month asks us to look honestly at what we don’t know about money — but Renee takes that charge a step further, asking us to look at what financial stress does to the whole person. When someone is in financial crisis, she explains, the effects ripple outward — into their decision-making, their self-worth, the kinds of relationships they enter, and the risks they take without fully understanding why. Trauma, she adds, is often the invisible root system underneath all of it. “A lot of people feel like they don’t have trauma,” she says. “But I’d say 90 percent of people have experienced it.” And many carry it without a name for it, having been conditioned to push through, keep moving, and keep performing wellness they don’t actually feel. Epigenetics, she notes, means that some of that inherited stress from generations of hardship lives in the body long before any single life event. When the nervous system is perpetually dysregulated, people reach for anything that soothes it — and those choices, whether around food, substances, spending, or sex, carry real consequences for long-term health.
“When someone does not have financial stability, it’s a chain reaction. It’s a domino effect — of multiple things that cause them to engage in unhealthy relationships, and they don’t even understand it because it’s not widely taught.”
Her response has been to build systems of knowledge, access, and community. Her nonprofit, QSS Baltimore, facilitates spaces for women to learn, explore, and practice wealth-building together through collective investment and financial literacy in Baltimore City schools, covering how to make money, manage money, and become an investor — a mission that couldn’t be more aligned with the spirit of Financial Literacy Month. Renee’s work bridges conversation and action—creating spaces where women can learn together and take collective steps toward ownership and financial empowerment.
She is currently pursuing a $2 million grant to expand into real estate development and workforce training for youth, partnering with a Queens member who owns a construction company to create pathways into the trades. A forthcoming podcast called 10 Grand — named for her ten grandchildren — will explore financial concepts and healthy living across generations, taking the literacy conversation all the way into the family living room. And she recently appeared in Daymond John’s Next Level CEO series, with her episode airing soon, a testament to the reach and resonance of the work she has been quietly building for nearly a decade.
All of this — the salon, the sisterhood, the ambassadorship, the nonprofit, the grant work, the generational wealth conversations — converges on Saturday, April 19th, when Renee hosts the Kings and Queens Wellness Rooftop Brunch from 1 to 5 p.m. at her downtown Baltimore office on Redwood Street. The event is open to both men and women and will feature workshops on mental health, Black love, healthy eating, men’s and women’s self-care, and financial literacy — with a sexual health component woven intentionally throughout. A panel discussion on relationships and sexual wellness is also being planned, echoing the beloved Black Love series Renee hosted years ago that brought couples together and, in at least one beautiful case, helped spark a marriage that endures today. That financial literacy workshop is no afterthought — in a month dedicated to economic empowerment, it is the throughline that connects every other conversation on the agenda.
The rooftop setting is no accident. Renee wants people to feel elevated — literally and figuratively — when they show up for their own wellness. She wants wellness to feel like a celebration and a community gathering, not an obligation or a clinic. She wants Kings and Queens to walk away informed, connected, and reminded of their own worth.
Her parting message for anyone navigating these intersecting paths is both practical and profound: “Be a lifelong learner. Understand that everything is interconnected. Health is wealth. And we are nothing without community — so nurture your relationships, don’t take anyone for granted, and have respect for one another.”
April is asking all of us to pay attention — to our bodies, our bank accounts, and the invisible threads that bind them together. Come to the rooftop on April 19th. Come hungry — for food, for knowledge, and for the kind of community that reminds you that your wholeness is not a luxury. It never was. It is your birthright.
To learn more, visit www.weareqss.com.
Michelle Petties is a TEDx speaker, Food Story coach, and the award-winning memoirist of Leaving Large: The Stories of a Food Addict. After gaining and losing 700 pounds, Michelle discovered the secret to overcoming stress and emotional overeating. Her free workbook, Mind Over Meals, reveals her core principles for losing weight and keeping it off.