TEEN YOGA FOUNDATION
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Mission Statement
The Teen Yoga Foundation is a small UK charity that aims to improve the well-being of young people through the practice of yoga, in schools and elsewhere, in the UK and abroad. TYF exists to get young people doing yoga because yoga helps them cope with life and learn how to flourish.
About This Cause
Who are we? The Teen Yoga Foundation is a small UK charity that aims to improve the well-being of young people through the practice of yoga, in schools and elsewhere, in the UK and abroad. We have been providing yoga to young people and training teacher to deliver it for 15 years. TYF exists to get young people doing yoga because yoga helps them cope with life and learn how to prosper. Why Teen Yoga? A lot of young people have problems with their mental health because they simply don’t know how to cope. Yoga provides powerful ways of dealing with stress in their personal, family and social lives by teaching them simple techniques to reduce tension and increase calm in all situations. This is transformative as it empowers them to engage more fully in their personal lives, school and society. What do we do? These aspects of yoga are not yet familiar in educational and youth contexts and the TYF is working to change this. We train teachers, teach young people, we speak to government, we collaborate with universities on research. We develop programmes tailored to specific issues such as drug addiction, homelessness, obesity, anxiety and depression. We collaborate with universities nationally and internationally. What have we done? Past work is centred on the training of over 750 yoga teachers with an estimated reach of around 500,000 people over 15 years. Projects since our constitution as a charity in 2016 include the Yoga Girls Can project which brought 550 young woman across the South West into the practice of yoga, the UK Teen Yoga survey which researched participation in yoga among adolescents across more than 300 teachers, and the TYF Westminster University Wellbeing survey which researched the effects of yoga across 150 young people in the UK. What are we doing now? 1. Hippocampus – an EU funded research supporting disadvantaged young people through yoga (Spain, Italy, Belgium, Norway, UK – using a whole school approach), with a total reach of over 650. The projects ended on 30th November 2019 with a conference at Friends House in Euston, which we will be filming. Range of human interest angles in the different countries participating. 2. Teen Yoga app – for supporting young people’s practice of yoga between sessions to make the activity more continuous and therefore more beneficial. The app is currently in beta and will be launched at the conference (called Instill). 3. Youth Yoga Ambassadors – a new programme launching this autumn in which we train young people who have a strong yoga practice already to act as champions to bring the activity to their peers. This helps to change perceptions of yoga, particularly among more resistant groups. 4. Boys and yoga – we have positive experience with bringing yoga to boys, some of whom are initially very resistant. March to May 2019 we worked with a football team in Finchley who got to the final of their competition and attributed this success, partially to having taken up yoga. 5. BME – we are working with charity organisations in Wandsworth to bring yoga to the BME community. Though there is resistance from some parts of the community there is good initial interest and organisers are hopeful that it might contribute to addressing violence in the community. 6. Yoga Girls Can – in this project we took a yurt to various university campuses in the South West and provided yoga for young women (one of the most physically inactive social groups). The project was generally well received and brought 550 young people into the practice of yoga. 7. Whole school approach – one of the most effective ways of bring the benefits of yoga to a school is to address it systemically, involving everyone. In this approach we teach the staff yoga first so that they are receptive to the teaching of yoga in the school as they have experienced the benefits. Then we roll out to the kids and sometimes parents. Though this involves extensive institutional commitment we are working with several schools in this way and a feature could cover that experience. 8. Teen Yoga Online – many teachers who would like to be trained to teach teens cannot attend our face to face courses. So we have designed an online version, which uses video extensively. The first edition was extremely well received (grade average 5 out of 5 in post course feedback survey) and the next edition is beginning this week. There are many human interest stories among the students and graduates. 9. Solidarity trips – Charlotta Martinus, the founder, has travelled to Africa to provide training to yoga teachers in communities that do not have the resources but badly need the benefits, most recently to Sierra Leone to support yoga provision in orphanages and in Johannesburg. What have we achieved so far? Less than we would have liked, of course, (we are small and run on a small budget) but much more than we could have expected. The growth in yoga of adolescents in secondary schools has been strong and stable from almost 0% 15 years ago to an estimated 25% currently, largely due to our work, supported for many years by Sport England. Perhaps one of the most telling demonstrations of the benefits of our work is that after that funding was withdrawn, when Sport England chose in 2016 to focus their funding on primary schools, 80% of the schools we were working in chose to continue, finding their own funding. In our new campaign this autumn we aim to try to collect funds so that the other 20%, the disadvantaged schools, can also do yoga.