All volunteers need to attend one 2.5 hour orientation to be permitted to volunteer at Outside In. These are typically held on the 3d Wednesday of every month at 6:30 in the evening. I will confirm the data and time of the next orientation. If enough people cannot make this orientation in either May or June, we might be able to schedule a separate orientation just for Street Yoga volunteers.

The Second step will be for all of us to undertake a yoga teacher's training, geared specifically to working at Outside In. This will be taught by Andre Pruitt, Matt Hartman, Sarahjoy Marsh and myself. Andre is the head of the day program at Outside In. It is tentatively scheduled for Wednesday, June 25th at 5:30pm at Outside In, and should last about three hours. This training will cover the issues that are unique to teaching yoga to the street youth population; some of these are outlined below in the section called “Points to Consider” .

By offering instruction in yoga, Street Yoga aims to help youth to increase their own physical strength and capacity to make their own way through life. Street Yoga will foster the building of self-empowerment through the teaching of yoga poses and practices which directly lead to the building of core body strength.

The youth to whom we offer this practice are primarily living on the streets. They are marginalized from mainstream society, and often are refugees from violently abusive homes and childhoods. They are seeking to find their way in a world that is often hostile to their very existence. They usually suffer a history of very violent abuse, and live precarious lives with little safety or security. It is likely our students will be from 17 to 22 years of age.

We fully intend and hope that the youth who practice yoga with Street Yoga will grow physically stronger, and better able to deal with the challenges they face and better able to attain the goals they create for themselves.

We are planning to measure outcomes of the Street Yoga experience through teacher observation, and more importantly, through gathering the feedback and stories of the youth themselves. We intend to create a simple notation setup so that before and after each class, the youth can write about how they feel, how they are progressing with yoga, whatever. These will be fully voluntary, and fully encouraged.

We hope as well, to eventually publish regular updates about our progress to the local and global communities, our successes and failures, so that others can benefit from our endeavors.

The day program classes will run twice weekly, most likely in the 2-6pm time frame, at Outside In. We are thinking that there will be two teachers for each class, with each instructor volunteering once every other week, more or less.

There will be ongoing volunteer teacher trainings where we can share information, support each other, try new vinyasas, learn more about the lives of the youth and how we can be of better service. These will likely occur about every 8 weeks, and will include educating not only ourselves, but Outside In staff about the work we are doing.

All classes will be 60 minutes long to start. Teachers are asked to be there 15 minutes before and after, to greet the youth, and encourage them to check in either verbally or on note-cards.