you belong in society.
You mention offering yoga as an activity for the youth. In what ways have you found it to be beneficial to them and have you seen a high participation or interest level from them?
Yes, definitely. With yoga, we actually started it before our house was even built. We did yoga in the street and the hilarious part of all this is that everyone called it “yogurt” in the beginning and some of the kids still do. It was something new. In Englewood, first and foremost, it is an opportunity desert, so, a new opportunity to move was considered “cool”. And a lot of people didn’t even know what yoga was. It wasn’t even a thing that white women do or anything, they just genuinely didn’t know what yoga was.
People gravitated towards it. So, we used to do yoga in the street and now that we have a Peace House, we do run community yoga at our house twice a week and then we have a community partnership with a local café that we do Saturday classes there.
Our yoga classes are very successful, and our kids do yoga every day. There’s scientific research that shows the power of yoga, specifically the power of mindfulness. Our kids have the odds already stacked up against them, we try to give them as many tools in their toolbelt as possible.
We as an organization, me as a human, I fundamentally believe that a breath can save a life. We’ve seen fights broken up by people just saying, “just breathe.” Our kids, unprompted, for our summer camp survey last year, about 36% of them said to the question: When asked what do you do when stressed out? They said, “I take a deep breath.”
So, that’s over 1/3, when stressed, they just breathe. We give the youth these tools and our elders too. All of our programs are intergenerational. When I teach a yoga class, there could be babies running around to seniors in chairs doing yoga.
You also just launched the grand opening of your Healing Justice Basketball Court, Congratulations! What made this court a priority on I Grow Chicago’s list?
Well, that story actually starts a few years back when the Peace House was first created. This block was incredibly violent and the commander at the time, when the idea was first brought up about putting a basketball court at the