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Teacher Training Overview

Bring Street Yoga to your City

This program is approved by the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) and Yoga Alliance for 14 hours of Continuing Education Units.

Our Core Teacher training will focus on teaching the skills needed to serve youth with yoga, meditation and other mindfulness practices.

In this training, you will receive practical, real world knowledge and techniques that will assist you in teaching at-risk youth. You will also be encouraged to dig into your personal experience in order to draw out your own courage and compassion as a teacher.

Street Yoga does not prescribe a strict methodology for bringing yoga to youth. Instead, we will cover the basic techniques we have found most useful and will present a brief sketch of the challenges faced by these young people. You can expect to learn:

Population characteristics and backgrounds
Communication techniques, including conflict prevention and de-escalation
Useful yoga postures and sequences, including ideas for special populations
Common challenges to creating and maintaining a yoga program for youth
How to work effectively with organizations and use resources efficiently

Intention

Going into the training, we see three goals, for which we set our intention:

That you will develop your confidence and skills to teach youth in a variety of situations.
That you will better understand the connections between youth homelessness, and foster care, a history of childhood abuse, addiction, family rejection and poverty.
That you will feel inspired to volunteer to teach yoga to homeless and marginalized youth in one of our programs, or to create a program of your own in your part of the world.

The youth we serve at Street Yoga, whose lives inform this training, include:

Youth in Foster Care
Homeless school children
Youth living on the streets
Runaway youth
Youth in transitional housing programs
Youth in sexual abuse treatment programs
Youth in detention
Youth in addiction recovery programs
Young mothers in shelters
Children in shelters
Youth in low income and transitional housing

Learning Objectives

After this training, participants will be able to:

explain why they want to be of service teaching yoga
teach a full yoga class to homeless youth using appropriate language, asanas, and pacing
articulate various causes and challenges of youth homelessness
describe the continuum of homelessness
identify potential boundary issues with clients and describe appropriate responses
identify the importance of having a community of support for expanding into this work
create a youth yoga program in collaboration with local social service providers.

All participants will receive a 64 page manual that supports these objectives, and provides background material for the training.

Intended Audience

This training is geared towards two primary groups of people:

Social Workers, Teachers, Health Care practitioners, and others who wish to learn how better to serve the youth in their care
Yoga Teachers who wish to expand their ability to be of service through yoga.

The training also includes self-inquiry, communication and mindfulness skills that are useful for everyone. As we noted in a recent email to one participant:

“What we do teach is how you can teach from what you do know, how you can take your yoga experience, your life skills, your passion to serve young people and weave that together into a practice that will bring the amazing benefits of yoga to the people you teach. One of the things we do is work on getting ourselves to see yoga not as 90 minutes on the mat in a studio, but so much more: it could be five minutes in a hallway with one kid, helping her breathe and calm down before she meets a probation officer. it could be working with 8 young people at a shelter and simply doing warrior pose, downward dog, some stretches, some breathing and a long savasana. could be working with staff to help them ground and center in their own breathing. there are so many ways we use yoga in our own lives without realizing it, and a big part of the training is to help you tease out all those glories and find ways to share them with others.”

What Others Have Said about the Training

Hi Mark,
I wanted to share with you a glimpse of success I had this evening. I offered my first yoga session for a group of girls at a local residential facility tonight. The atmosphere was very similar to the one that we created in our training and it actually felt really comfortable to me because I felt like it was exactly what I was anticipating (thanks to yourtraining). There were varying levels of interest among the whole group as they gathered in, but I successfully taught them Sun Salutation-A by breaking it up into two sections and putting it all together. All 10 girls were doing it together followed by a fun balance of tree pose. It was really exciting to watch.

I will also be volunteering to another group of young women in a homeless shelter, I met with them last week. Thank you so much again for everything that you offered us in the training…I would have never felt as prepared if I didn’t go through it!”

- Laura E., Rochester, NY

In 2011, we trained over 500 yoga teachers to teach yoga to youth in social service environments; we offered weekend workshops in Portland, Seattle, San Diego, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Tucson, Washington D.C., Minneapolis, Boston, Bend, OR, Salt Lake City, Belfast, Spokane, and Toronto, Canada.

* Please note, these states do not accept National CE approval programs and require alternate processes: CA, MI, NC, OH WV
Please contact Street Yoga if you are in these states and we can provide adequate resources.

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Please note that trainings fill quickly. Click here to fill out the application.

If you have any questions, just drop us a line.

Thank you, Namaste.