Yoga+ Friends

Inspiration

We have seen first hand that yoga has an effective and positive lasting impact on refugees who are looking to improve their mental health.

Our aim

The aim of this initiative is to extend that impact to more communities and make yoga accessible by allowing people to take part within their own homes

How we built it

We created a Get Started Pack to provide information on how to organise yoga classes and instructional videos, we have hosted this on a website and have put together support crew to assist yoga champions

Challenges we ran into

What is the most simple experiment we can run to test whether refugees will self-organise to practice yoga with their friends

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We have created the Get Started Pack and website this weekend. We have also had one refugee self organise a class using our Get Started Pack (Samira) We have found that refugees who are students of existing classes are already practicing at home in groups We have found through an evaluation conducted by STARRTS that the symptoms of depression and yoga are reduced after 10 yoga classes We have already heard great feedback of many people already interested in Yoga+ Friends and to be able to see the impact this could have in the future within refugee communities is very exciting.

What we learned

Bringing diverse experiences and viewpoints to tackle a problem leads to interesting new ideas and changed the direction of our solution

What's next

Pilot of the "Yoga+Friends" program and feedback from refugees about the pilot Running events to support yoga champions