Street Yoga is pleased to announce that on Oct. 1, our headquarters is moving to Seattle!

Street Yoga will appoint Seattle-based, Stephanie Toby (Programs) and Jessica Osberg (Development & Training) as co-executive directors. Joshua Ginzler, of Seattle, has accepted the nomination for Street Yoga Board President.

We are pleased that our Seattle-based Yoga for Youth programs and national trauma-informed yoga training program will continue without interruption. Our Portland Yoga for Youth programs will be transferred to our partner, Living Yoga. We believe that these changes will allow both organizations to more effectively fulfill our missions — to make yoga accessible to those with greater challenges and less access to services.  We believe the move to Seattle will allow Street Yoga to grow and deepen our work to promote healing, empowerment, justice and peace in the world.

One quick story to show an example of this healing: A girl attended Street Yoga classes in a health center at a low-income school. The girl had been cutting herself for years. Her mental heath counselor — who referred the girl to the Street Yoga class — had engaged her in many different therapies, but they were not helping. After several weeks of yoga class, this girl experienced a major shift and stopped cutting. She started coming to her counseling sessions in an open state, willing to engage and wanting to make changes.

It is stories like this that inspire us to continually improve our programming and contribution to the yoga service community — in Seattle and across the country.  We have plans to develop additional workshops to increase our community’s knowledge about yoga for youth facing adversity. We hope to create stronger avenues for increasing diversity at all levels – staff, board, volunteers and trainees. We also plan to implement a youth development council to provide input on our programming, and further empower these young people with leadership opportunities.

We have been working incredibly hard to set Street Yoga up for our next phase. We are so very excited about the future and hope you are, too! Thank you so much for walking the path with us.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to reach out.

Stephanie Toby & Jessica Osberg

[Photo by Michael Righi & Nathan – CC BY]