Is A Better Way To Thrive Woke?

Company Overview

A Better Way To Thrive is a natural-health education business run by Kristen Smith, a trained herbalist, certified aromatherapist, and holistic health educator who built the platform around a distinctly Christian framing of natural wellness — the tagline being natural health for Christians, with the guiding message that natural health is a blessing from God that can be enjoyed one step at a time. The site publishes a deep library of practical herbalism content: guides on making fire cider, herb-infused honey and oils, elderberry syrup, and plantain salve; primers on echinacea and dandelion; articles addressing whether herbalism is compatible with Christian faith; and myth-busting pieces on essential oils drawn from her book on separating truth from myth. Alongside the free content, Smith sells her own resources through the site's shop — including The Minimalist Natural Medicine Cabinet, a guide to building a small, versatile home remedy collection without overwhelm or overspending — and offers coaching-style work-with-me services. The audience is explicitly faith-shaped: testimonials on the site come from Christian women who arrived anxious about whether herbs were spiritually permissible and left reassured that their healing rests in God rather than in plants or methodologies. The business is a one-woman education platform with an email community at its center.

ESG & Sustainability

The platform's environmental ethic is the herbalist's one: plants as God's provision, used whole and used sensibly, which predates and bypasses corporate sustainability frameworks entirely. There is no ESG report because there is no corporation — the operation is a solo educator with a website, a newsletter, and a small digital-product shop. The genuinely green practices are the substantive ones the content teaches: making your own remedies from bulk dried herbs, which cuts packaging, processing, and shipping compared to a supplements-industry supply chain; the minimalist medicine-cabinet philosophy, which is explicitly anti-overconsumption; and foraging-adjacent skills like using plantain and dandelion — common weeds — as first-aid and food. Digital delivery of the books and guides keeps the product footprint near zero. None of this is marketed as sustainability; it is simply what traditional herbalism is. Readers who roll their eyes at net-zero pledges but practice thrift, gardening, and home production will recognize this as the real thing — the environmentalism of stewardship rather than the environmentalism of disclosures.

DEI Programs

A Better Way To Thrive has no DEI programs, no diversity statements, and no organizational structure in which such a thing could exist — it is a sole-practitioner education business. The platform's inclusivity claims run through its actual audience work: Smith's content repeatedly addresses the beginner, the overwhelmed, and the anxious — women who have been flooded with contradictory natural-health information and need someone to say start small, one step at a time, you do not have to do everything. Her tone is notably non-judgmental by her own readers' testimony: one writes that she stopped beating herself up over all the things she thought she needed to do right away. That pastoral, meet-people-where-they-are approach is the small-business version of accessibility, and it is aimed at a faith community the mainstream wellness industry largely ignores or actively alienates. The values orientation is explicit and unapologetic: this is natural health taught from and for a Christian worldview, at a moment when much of the wellness space fuses its messaging with progressive spirituality. Buyers wanting the faith framing get it front and center, not diluted.

LGBTQ+ Advocacy

The platform does no Pride marketing, sponsors no advocacy organizations, and has no presence on the Human Rights Campaign's Corporate Equality Index or any cause-marketing framework. Its content calendar is the herbalist's year — elderberry season, garden harvests, holiday remedies — rather than the activism calendar. The wellness and essential-oils industry, notably, is one of the more Pride-active consumer categories through its big multi-level-marketing and retail players; a solo Christian herbalism educator is structurally and editorially outside that economy. Nothing in the platform's public materials references identity politics or social-issue campaigns of any kind; the controversy it engages is the internal one of whether Christians should use herbs at all — a question Smith answers at length, pastorally, and in the affirmative. For values-based readers, the finding is a clean null: no rainbow campaigns, no cause donations, no activism — a wellness voice whose only agenda is teaching home herbalism inside a Christian frame.

Political Activity

The platform has no PAC, no political contributions, no lobbying, and — unusually for a health-adjacent voice — almost no partisan footprint at all. Smith's public energies go into theology-of-health questions and practical skill-building, not electoral politics; the site's hardest-edged content is aimed at wellness-industry misinformation, not at politicians. The platform's relationship to controversy is pastoral rather than partisan: the is-herbalism-sin question, essential-oil myths, and the reassurance of readers navigating family skepticism. There is a cultural-positioning reality worth naming honestly: a natural-health platform framed explicitly for Christians sits adjacent to health-freedom debates that have partisan edges, and some readers arrive through those channels — but the platform itself does not campaign, endorse, or fund anything political. The financial model is the transparent one: readers buy books and guides directly or join the free email community. For the Buy Woke Free audience, the political dimension here is effectively silent, which at this scale reads as values-neutral: the business sells education, takes no sides, and discloses no donations.

Consumer Impact

For Christian households interested in natural remedies, A Better Way To Thrive is one of the most directly aligned platforms in the wellness space: a trained herbalist and certified aromatherapist who teaches the craft inside an explicitly biblical framework. The practical case: a deep free-content library covering the workhorse remedies — fire cider, elderberry syrup, herb-infused oils and honeys, salves; books that deflate essential-oil mythology rather than inflate it; a minimalist medicine-cabinet philosophy that saves money by resisting the buy-everything impulse; and personal guidance for readers who want help sequencing changes. The testimonials have a consistent shape: relief at finding natural health and Christian faith compatible, and momentum from small, manageable steps. Caveats to weigh honestly: herbal remedies are gentle and variable — this is education for everyday wellness, not medical care, and serious conditions need real clinicians; and the platform's claims should be read as traditional-use guidance rather than clinical evidence. The values case is total: no DEI, no Pride commerce, no political spending, and an openly Christian identity. If your wellness dollars and attention are also values votes, this platform earns both cleanly.