Newsletter, Jan 2, 2004

We've been continuing our teaching this fall, and as we join winter and a new year, we look forward to continuing and growing the good work we have been graced to perform. I know i speak for all the Street Yoga volunteers in wishing you an enriching and healthy new year.

Our work at Outside In and White Shield Center continues. We offer two classes per week at Outside In. Our Thursday class is focused more on gaining physical benefits from yoga, while our Sunday class is focused more on meditative and restorative poses.

We also held our first staff workshop at Outside In November, where we treated a number of O/I employees to a free yoga class. This allowed us to strengthen our ties with the individuals there who work directly with the youth.

Our classes at White Shield Center have grown more popular. A number of the girls have started to practice yoga on their own, and they often have a lot of questions about what yoga is, how it affects their body, why we do it and so on. It is a delight to be able to share with these young women as they strive to find a place for themselves in this world.

We have been in touch with folks at the Community Transitional School here in Portland, as well as Insights Teen Parenting Program. Both have expressed interest in offering yoga classes to their youth, and we are in the process of working out details of these endeavors.

We have also been in touch with some folks in Seattle who are teaching at homeless shelters in Washington state. We are exploring areas of collaboration, including possible joint research efforts on the effects (beneficial as well as unexpected) of yoga within specific homeless populations. At minimum, we will be sharing information about the successes and challenges we encounter teaching yoga to homeless and at risk people.

Anyone interested in volunteering for any of these projects is invited to visit our website and fill out a very simple volunteer contact form, and we will be in touch with you shortly.

Beyond yoga, we are initiating our first wellness class this winter, titled Healthy Meals on Ten Dollars in Food Stamps . This class is geared towards helping homeless youth create healthy food on limited budgets and no kitchen access. Ideally we will be able to emerge from this with a small booklet containing easy to make, inexpensive foods that meet different needs for homeless youth, which we will give away for free. A lot of the youth have improving nutrition as a benchmark they are striving to fulfill, and we hope this will give them momentum in that positive direction.

As part of our educational mission, and in an effort to better connect homeless youth with yoga, we have tried to figure out what about yoga is beneficial for youth on the streets. We concluded that warming the body from the inside (especially in the winter), enhancing immunity, increasing flexibility and the like were direct benefits for folks living on the streets. You can view a sample of our latest outreach flyer at these links: front of card and back of card . The good folks at Outside In have setup a yoga/wellness board there to give us a place to share information, articles and the like with the youth. Ideally, we will be able to build a yoga/wellness library at our teaching locations so that the youth can study outside of our yoga classes.

If anyone has any books or magazines or subscriptions they would be interested in donating for these libraries, drop us an email .

There was also a mention of Street Yoga in the latest issue of the Yoga Journal. We are very appreciative of their attention and support.

We are starting to gather the lessons we have learned into modestly publishable pieces, which we intend to share with the world at large through our website. We have made a connection with the Yoga Research and Education Center in California. They have added Street Yoga to four of their bibliographies, and are interested in possibly publishing some of our findings.

We've also made a connection with the Bastyr University in Seattle about doing a joint research effort around the issue of homeless youth and nutrition.

We have made some improvements to our website recently. Information should be easier to find, and perhaps most interesting for the long run is the Learning section, which has a bare bones outline of that which we are discovering as we continue our teaching efforts. There is also a new community site for Street Yoga which will be available shortly. This will be a single location for all the teachers to record their yoga teaching observations. We hope to make this resource available to sibling organizations around the country so that people teaching yoga to homeless and at-risk people can share information at a single, accessible site.

As we slide into this new year, i hope we can all take a moment to recall to mind at least one thing for which we are truly grateful. The year 2004 holds a lot in balance, and our continued mindfulness and dedication can only enhance the peace and health of our world.

Namaste,

mark