Bringing the Healing Power of Yoga to Homeless Men, Women, and Children Worldwide
Our Mission is to Bring the Healing Power of Yoga to Homeless Men, Women, and Children Worldwide.
Right now the homeless epidemic is the worst it has ever been affecting over 100 million worldwide. Homeless men, women and children are often dealing with significant personal challenges including traumatic stress, drug and alcohol abuse, mental illness, sleep deprivation and depression.
Did you know that yoga has been shown to be more effective than psychotherapy and counseling? For instance yoga has been proven to reduce traumatic stress, addictive behavior, depression, mental illness, diabetes, and insomnia.
Yoga has also been proven to provide these positive benefits:
1. Yoga empowers the homeless to take action
2. Yoga increases a homeless person’s self-esteem
3. Yoga improves the ability to mentally and emotionally function in society
4. Yoga gives homeless a sense of community and well being
5. Yoga improves a homeless person’s physical health and mobility
I think we all can agree that yoga is a powerful tool for the struggles the homeless face. Yoga can help provide a foundation toward better mental, physical and emotional health with a higher quality of life.
Your contribution will allow us to provide yoga mats, classes and teachers to guide the practice of yoga in homeless communities near you.
Donate today and namaste.
Our mission is to bring the healing power of yoga to homeless men, women and children worldwide. Right now there is NO cohesive initiative with adequate funding and resources that provides free yoga to serve the hundreds of thousands of homeless that could benefit from the practice.
Your contribution will go directly toward providing yoga teachers and classes into homeless shelters and community centers to help reduce trauma, stress and addictive behaviors within the homeless community.
Yoga 4 Homeless is establishing a scalable model to do the following:
1. Raise massive awareness around the homeless epidemic
2. Recruit & train yoga teachers to teach yoga to the homeless
3. Create working relationships with homeless shelters and community centers to offer yoga for free
4. Build partnerships with yoga studios and yoga related brands to support the cause
5. Establish a Yoga 4 Homeless teacher training program to build a large network of certified yoga teachers around the world to teach yoga to the homeless
Listen to a Yoga Instructor talk about the Power Yoga has on the Homeless
Millions of Americans take classes to learn the poses and breathing of the ancient Indian practice of yoga. In recent years, yoga organizations have been reaching out to people who may not normally have the opportunity to take yoga classes, such as the homeless, trauma survivors, and people with drug and alcohol addictions. VOA’s Deborah Block visited Green Door, a small mental health center in Washington where yoga is helping change people’s lives for the better.
About Yoga 4 Homeless
The Yoga 4 Homeless mission is to bring the healing power of yoga to homeless men, women and children worldwide. Our team believes that yoga can provide a path toward personal transformation and equip homeless people with the tools they need to get off the streets and become functional in society.
Yoga 4 Homeless was started by Andrew Beinbrink in December 2015 with a simple goal to donate yoga mats to the homeless so they wouldn’t have to sleep on the cold, concrete during the winter. After providing yoga mats to homeless in the San Diego community and hearing how much better they slept Andrew was inspired to provide more than yoga mats.
Once the project started building more momentum, the next logical step was to partner with a number of yoga studios and local businesses including Lululemon. Realizing mats weren’t enough, we spoke with local homeless shelters and community centers and saw the opportunity to bring the healing practice of yoga into the homeless community.
After a few months of research and studying the homeless epidemic, we decided to focus our efforts on bringing yoga teachers and classes to homeless shelters and community centers. We are currently working with a few shelters and homeless community centers in California and Texas and looking to aggressively expand.
Progress made already
In just three short months we are working with multiple homeless shelters in CA and TX and positioned to bring the healing practice of yoga to thousands of homeless men, women and children. Here is a News feature of me passing out mats walking the streets in downtown San Diego East Village. The mats are very helpful for sleeping on instead of sleeping on the cold concrete.
We have already got support from these Organizations
Take the Yoga 4 Homeless Challenge and Share on Social Media: Watch Video Below to Learn how to take the Challenge
Your contribution of $5 or more will allow us to provide yoga mats, classes and yoga instructors to guide classes for homeless in cities near you.
Yoga has already proven to be an amazing source of healing and personal transformation for the homeless community. Your charitable giving will impact the lives of homeless men, women, and children by allowing our staff to bring them the practice of yoga, but we need your help.
Choose from the Perk Levels that we have created and help support the Yoga 4 Homeless Movement by Pledging to our campaign and taking the Yoga 4 Homeless Challenge.
Our program benefits the following stakeholders:
– Homeless men, women and children (teens) getting free access to yoga mats, professional classes and ongoing education
– Homeless veterans (we intend on a class that would be specifically developed for veterans
– Homeless shelter / community centers – provide them programming to support their goals
– Yoga teachers contributing to teaching students and serving the homeless community
– Yoga studios donating mats, promoting our program and also hosting classes at certain partner studio locations
– Corporate partnerships supporting and promoting our program
– Volunteers gaining the benefit of servicing the homeless community
Yoga 4 Homeless is a nonprofit that was created back in December to help support the homeless through the practice of yoga. Being a new nonprofit means we still have lots to learn, but we have a team that is willing to ensure that we make the largest positive impact on the homeless.
The risks and challenges that we might encounter include resistance from local shelters to be able to implement a program such as yoga for homeless based on limited space staff or resources.
There’s also a risk that the homeless participation will be very low and that the program will not be adopted and successful enough to continue.
Another risk is we are not able to find enough yoga teachers that are willing to teach the homeless.
The final risk is if we aren’t able to receive the ongoing funding by corporate partnerships or private donations we will have to evaluate the sustainability of the project.