ken atchity door to door: Yoga Gives Back April Newsletter

Yoga Gives Back April Newsletter

E Newsletter- April 2012

For the cost of one yoga class, you can change a life.

SUCCESS STORY

We are thrilled to share the great outcome of YGB's direct funding program "Sister Aid" from its first year:

Out of 22 women who received micro loans, 20 are successfully running their business today
Most women repay fully by May 2012, and will get the 2nd loans
Total income increased 400% among these women
22 daughters all remain in school, with 12 of them A grade
One son advanced into the 2nd year at Dental Medical College, one girl advances to 2nd year in college and plans to major in fashion design technology
Six children at orphanage remain fully educated and boarded

Based on this success and the growth in our revenue, YGB added 22 more mothers for micro loans and 22 daughters for education funding at NISHTHA, West Bengal. At D Trust Home in Karnataka, we added four more girls for their education and one mother for her business loan. With your continued support, we are committed to fund these 103 direct fund recipients for five years.
Report from India

D Trust Home, Karnataka, South India

These sisters never saw their father and their mother died four years ago. Their grandmother and uncle fed them, but were no longer able to support these orphaned girls. They are now in 5th and 6th grades and showing amazing skills in dance. Their studies are going well.

NISHTHA: Tripuranagar Village, West Bengal

In addition to administering micro loans, NISHTHA assembles women once a month in their village to discuss topics such as "Children's Rights" and "Reproductive Health" so they can make informed decisions and better protect their children. In these rural villages, girls are most neglected, and often become victims of discrimination and abuse. These sessions are extremely successful in enabling the women to share openly, their daily concerns.
NISHTHA's director Mina Das says in their most recent report---"These women could never imagine that one day they would have the opportunity to earn money. After one year, with the support of Yoga Gives Back, 20 out of 22 women are running successful businesses. Pratima Sardar is noteworthy. She started the business of selling ready-made Sarees with a loan of 5000 Rupees ($95 U.S.). She now carries goods to the streets but will soon have a shop in the market. We are trying to extend all possible support for her to become a role model in the area."

YGB is delighted to work with these two NGOs in India that send us updates and photos of our fund recipients to share with our supporters like you.

Exciting News

Thank You Mother India Update!!

Let's unite on Saturday, September 29th, for our 2nd annual global day of support. On this special day, we call upon your Karma Yoga. Host an event, donate or become a sponsor. This year's goal is $50,000! Registration will start soon and you will receive an invitation E-mail.

YGB Ambassador Kino McGregor announces her commitment

Kino is generously offering proceeds from the sales of her popular "New Kino Pro Yoga Mat" to YGB this year!! Thank you Kino.

YGB London Team gains two new members!!

Welcome Heather Bonnie Lee and Rachel Goodman to make a great team with Emily Gopaul in London.

Upcoming Events

Monday 2nd, 16th and 23rd April 2012, 6:30-8pm,@
Whole Foods Market, 63-97 Kensington High Street, London, W8 5SE
"Yoga Magazine's Charity Yoga Class Series "Give Back!"

Sally Parkes is this month's teacher. Thank you Yoga Magazine UK, Sally and Wholefoods for your continued and generous support!!

Just £8 per class or £25 for 4 classes

All money raised is donated to Yoga Gives Back!

Saturday May 19th, 12-2:30pm,@
Omkar108, Los Angeles, CA
"Music, Munchies and Facts about American Veda"

Philip Goldberg, author of "American Veda" will give a talk with his entertaining multimedia presentation, "THE GREAT YOGIC TRANSMISSION: HOW INDIA CHANGED OUR WORLD". Enjoy a healthy lunch, and melodic Kirtan concert by Guru Prem Singh and Simran. Thank you Omkar 108 of YGB Ambassador Jorgen Christiansson for hosting this special event!!

Buy tickets or donate @ First Giving

Tuesday June, 5th, 10-12pm,@
Stella McCartney's boutique in Beverly Hills, Beverly Hills, CA

A very special yoga class with Kathryn Budig. More details soon.

Thank you for these past events

Ashtanga Yoga Confluence , San Diego, California

March 2-4th; AYC organizers, Jenny Barrett-Bouwer, Deborah Ifill and Carol Miller, generously invited YGB to participate in this amazing weekend! We met so many passionate supporters from all over the U.S., and the world. Thanks also for Zico for generous donation.

Thanks again YGB Ambassador Chaz Russ, who generously donated proceeds from her annual retreat in Ojai in March.

High school student, Avanti Prasanna, promotes YGB in India!! 18th International Conference on High Performance Computing , Bangalore, India

December 20, 2011; A brave high school student from Palisades Charter High School, California, single-handedly set up a booth to promote YGB in Bangalore!!

From Avanti, "As part of my Community Service, I have decided to support Yoga Gives Back. I chose YGB because it is based in Los Angeles where I live and they provide help to women and children in India…the country of my birth. The purpose of my project is to raise awareness of YGB, which is a great example of people doing their Karma Yoga."

Thank you Avanti. We are so touched by your action and such understanding support. You are making history for us!!

Your support is making a difference one event at a time. Thank you!!

		IN THIS ISSUE
SUCCESS STORY EXCITING NEWS UPCOMING EVENTS PAST EVENTS

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Yoga Gives Back is a 501(c)(3) Non-Profit Organization.

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Yoga Gives Back

Written by Kayoko Mitsumatsu

From Posture To Power: Microcredit Changes Lives On Both Sides of the Ocean

We can talk about making change. But affecting real change in the world comes from impacting the lives of individuals. It comes from empowering people to be independent and able to make a living on their own while at the same time being fully integrated in our interdependent global community. Sometimes it takes something that seems to be radical to make this change, but these shifts can be deceptively small. They can be even as small (or as large) as the cost of a Los Angeles Yoga class.

How could this be? In the practice of microcredit, lending seemingly small amounts of money to small-scale entrepreneurs allows them to succeed and change their circumstances. This is the fundamental basis of microcredit’s transformative power; it’s a revolutionary concept in finance. This practice shifts the emphasis from financial transactions being focused only about large loans and large scale businesses, which are out of reach of many one-person operations, institutions and organizations – to lending practices that actually make a positive difference in a person’s life. Microcredit practices based on social justice and empowerment operate through a combination of small-scale loans based on trust and community support, with structured repayment plans and programs that encourage savings. In these situations, people actually have the opportunity to solidify long-term change in their lives.

Dr. Muhammad Yunus and the Yoga Gives Back Team: Joel Bender, Leslie Hendry, Dr. Muhammad Yunus and Kayoko Mitsumatsu (left-right)

In 2006, economist Dr. Muhammad Yunus and the institution he founded, the Grameen Bank, were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. This award was in recognition of their revolutionary efforts to create this micro-credit model, support sustainable economic practices, and provide an alternative to what were exploitive norms. When a person is caught in a cycle of poverty, they may become trapped in the system, particularly since large banking institutions have historically ignored people without assets or credit histories, who are just starting out and who may not have already proven themselves. Most banks prefer to lend large sums of money that represent a greater profit margin and are set up only for large loans in order to make a profit themselves. And even making it more challenging, people at the bottom of the economic scale worldwide have had to rely on moneylenders charging usurious terms and interest rates to obtain funds to plant the next crop, buy inventory of new equipment, or upgrade a business in any way. Institutions such as the Grameen Bank and their affiliates are offering another approach. It’s one that has significantly impacted millions of people.

As Dr. Yunus described in an exclusive interview with Yoga Gives Back in May, 2009, “We started in 1976, and today within Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, eight million people borrow micro loans, ninety-seven percent of them women.” This represents an enormous potential for change and empowerment that just did not exist on a large scale in this form prior to 1976.

There is a social cycle in economics, and Dr. Yunus explained this: “Poverty is not inside the person. Poverty is forced from outside. Poor people are as capable [a] human being as anybody else. They have the same power and energy, same potential. But they are denied such facilities. They cannot express themselves. Money is one of the most important items missing in their lives. You need a dollar to catch a dollar. You cannot catch a dollar with an empty hand. So, that first dollar, nobody has given to her. So she remains dependent on someone else. She has to be hired, to slave; she has to work to make food available on the table. What we have done, we have put that first dollar into her hands as a banking proposition. Conventional banks never come to the poor people. They go to rich people to make more money. The person who does not have a dollar – she cannot get it. So we did it. We did it in a way that is affordable to her. Because we do not insist on collateral. There is no collateral.”

While that may seem like a radical concept, the Grameen Bank has proven that their success is much more than ideological. Dr Yunus cited statistics for us, “The repayment rate is almost 100%, without collateral or anything. This is the strength of microcredit which is now spread all over the world. There are by now at least 150 million borrowers in the world today. Bu it is still very small comparing to the need. We need more microcredit organizations in the world so that more people can be reached.”

Yoga Gives Back is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization begun in LA, with the goal to provide a way for Western Yoga practitioners to give back to India, the birthplace of Yoga, which has given us so much. We’re heeding Dr. Yunus’ call to reach more people through expanded opportunities for and awareness of microcredit and have targeted India and Indian families, women, and would-be entrepreneurs, who would be otherwise stuck in the cycle of poverty that Dr. Yunus described. Yoga Gives Back supports microfinancing operations in India, through the Grameen Foundation, headquartered in Washington, DC. Donations go directly to Grameen Koota, Bangalore, South India and our YGB awareness campaign focuses on the real stories of how poor women are changing their lives with small loans from Grameen Koota.

Ms. Vinatha M Reddy

Grameen Koota was started by visionary teacher and philanthropist, Ms. Vinatha M Reddy (pictured, above) in 1999, who learned about Nobel Peace Recipient Dr Muhammad Yunus’ microfinancing and immediately began exploring ways of replicating his work in her hometown. In 2000, she started providing small microcredit loans, averaging $25.00 a month, to fifty local women. Today, Grameen Koota’s work is reaching out to over 280,000 women in Bangalore, Mysore and many areas of Karnataka state, in South India, making real impact on these women’s lives as well as on the local economy.

Yoga Gives Back

The Los Angeles-based Yoga Gives Back has a worldwide reach and began out of the inspiration and dedication of my Yoga mentor Joel Bender and me. Our group has suddenly started growing almost daily and our mission is shared by a quickly expanding and loving Yoga community.

When I was growing up in Japan, which is a very middle-class society, I had never experienced or seen any real poverty, especially growing up in Tokyo in 1960s and 1970s, when Japan's post-war economic miracle was taking place. Then, I had a chance to live in Brazil in the late 1970s for two years, where as a teenager, I saw the divide between poverty and wealth, the reality of the real slums, kids on the streets begging every time you stopped the car at the traffic light, all very much like India. Social injustice hit me hard.

Once I started Yoga practice and feeling my life being so enriched by it , I felt a need to use my resources to help others. I was producing a documentary on Social Entrepreneurship and learned about microfinancing. I shared this information with Joel [featured in the teacher profile in this month’s issue of LA YOGA] who had been looking for the way he could give back to India since his first visit there – so we teamed up.

When I think about the growth of Yoga Gives Back thus far, I give a lot of credit to the entrepreneurship and volunteer spirit of Americans, willing to embrace and support a new grass roots campaign like ours.

Kayoko Mitsumatsu, co-founder of Yoga Gives Back, is a documentary filmmaker whose films deal with social justice issues, including First They Killed My Father a memoir of a Cambodia’s Killing Fields’ survivor.

A Life Changing Story of Microcredit: Jayashree

Jayashree

Jayashree lives in the suburbs of Bangalore and is married and the mother of two children. We visited her at her humble dirt floor one room home for the first time in 2007. We were touched by her warm smile and most generous hospitality, serving us hot tea and cookies.

Jayashree was born into a very poor family in Bangalore. When she was a child, her family’s financial situation became so severe that she had to drop out of school and work at a garment factory. She toiled throughout her childhood and after she got married at fifteen, her meager earnings had to support her ailing in-laws. She had two children. Her husband’s rickshaw business was not enough to pay her sons’ education or secure food for the family.

In 2007, Jayashree learned from her neighbors about Grameen Koota’s microcredit program and applied for her first loan. She was granted a first loan of 7,000 rupees ($175), and immediately bought her husband’s auto rickshaw. Owning their own rickshaw business increased their income significantly.

Jayashree was able to pay back her entire loan in one year and became eligible for her second loan in 2008. Having proven her diligence, her second loan amount doubled to 15,000 rupees ($375). This time, she bought a sewing machine and started stitching bags. The family’s earnings have now tripled and she is earning 150 rupees ($3.75) a day. In addition, she opened a small shop next to her house to sell her products which is earning her an additional 100 rupees ($2.50) a day.

She is sending her elder son to a medical school. Her son dreams of becoming a doctor and thanks his mother’s business for providing his education, their own home and daily food.

To participate in a Yoga practice where the proceeds support Yoga Gives Back and directly impact the transformation of not only your own life, but that of someone in India, start your Thanksgiving week at Yogaglo, Sunday, November 22, 10:00 A.M. - 12 noon. Some of the teachers include John Sahakian, Felicia Tomasko, Alexandra Aiken and Ally Hamilton; more to be announced. Yogaglo.com; yogagivesback.com.

For more information on Yoga Gives Back or to host a Yoga Gives Back class at your own studio or location, visit: yogagivesback.org or contact yogagivesback@earthlink.net.