Full Circle: Bringing Yoga to Underserved Populations in Africa and the U.S.

Can yoga transform lives across race, nationality, age, gender, and economic status? Will it be valued if offered without charge? Can people who are struggling to survive be able to transform their ideas of what might be possible through the practice of yoga?

These were some of the hard questions, the founders of the African Yoga Project (AYP) asked themselves back in 2007, before launching their programs in Africa. Since then, the AYP has received the answers to those questions, and much, much more.

Each year since its inception, the Africa Yoga Project has empowered over 250,000 Kenyans through the power of yoga. AYP co-founder Paige Elenson worked with well-known yoga teacher Baron Baptiste to facilitate the first yoga teacher training in Kenya. Fifty-two teachers, trained by Baptiste, offer free classes in prisons, schools, special needs centers, HIV/AIDS support groups, schools for the deaf, and rural villages. They offer yoga lessons, meditation, self-exploration through inquiry, and empowerment through performing arts.

The organization has grown so that today, at 80 locations around Kenya, over 5,000 people are participating in more than 250 community yoga classes every week.

The Africa Yoga Project is more than yoga. The project provides community activism, relationship building, and health education, in addition to facilitating concrete projects such as building schools and funding educational and environmental efforts.

AYP’s extraordinary growth since 2007 has been noticed near and far. In fact, the program has become so successful that American researchers wonder if it could be a model for similar work in the US bringing yoga to underserved populations in the U.S.

In mid-July 2013, a team of researchers from the Graduate School of Education at the University of Buffalo headed to Kenya to study the effects of the AYP’s work. The team of psychologists and yoga instructors went with the intention of starting a similar project in Buffalo, New York.

“Jobs are being created,” Catherine Cook-Cottone, associate professor in the Department of Counseling at the University of Buffalo told the UB reporter. “And it is all healthy and has essentially none of the impact on the earth that you might see in other industries. It is an amazing thing, and we want to figure out what the program means to people and how it is changing lives.”

Cottone was particularly intrigued to see the effects of yoga in a part of the world where chronic stress associated with poverty and violence prevails. She believes that yoga is “neurologically integrating,” providing tools to move from “fight, flight, or freeze” to “repair, rest, and restore.”

While Buffalo, New York, is quite different from Nairobi, Kenya, the research team is committed to using social science research techniques to determine how they might be able to bring the physical, emotional, and mental benefits of yoga to underserved communities in Buffalo

The team’s goal is to have instructors from Buffalo’s Ease Side neighborhoods learn how to teach yoga in Nairobi and then return to teach in their schools in New York state. The team will then study the effects of this program.

Twice-weekly yoga classes for East Side children in Buffalo started last summer proving that the AYP’s innovative and successful program has traveled full circle, from the United States to Africa and back again. The healing potential of yoga knows no boundaries or limits.