Kayoko Mitsumatsu’s passion for yoga and compassion for impoverished women in rural India lead her to founding Yoga Gives Back. Their new global campaign “Thank You Mother India” (TYMI) is challenging every single yoga studio in the world to host just ONE awareness and fundraising class in the community by January 31, 2016 to help fund programs for education and the economic empowerment of over 700 mothers, daughters and orphans in West Bengal, Chamarajanagar and Bangalore.
Because of the dire lack of economic and educational opportunities, as well as social norms disfavoring them, rural Indian girls and young women are often regarded as less worthy of investment or protection from their families, resulting in early marriage and motherhood, and high rates of poverty and disease. Investing in this population leads to better educated, safer, healthier, and economically powerful adolescent girls and women, contributing to a substantially better future not just for the individual girls, but for their families, communities, and our world.
Yoga Gives Back engages yoga studios to raise funds with their classes that support a micro-financing program which lends small amounts of cash to rural women to initiate real change; they build small businesses and can pay back their loans with enough money leftover to feed and educate their families. The impact of this type of investment is intergenerational; a mother with a few years of formal education is considerably more likely to send her children to school, breaking the intergenerational chain of poverty.
For the cost of one yoga class, you can save a life. Yoga Gives Back is committed to fund each person for a minimum of five years to ensure the seeds of real transformation.
Help us support the empowerment of women and children in Mother India, the birthplace of yoga. Support women and children and Yoga Gives Back will provide them with educational and economic opportunities.
“Education is not a priority to the families of impoverished high school girls in rural West Bengal. With our five-year Scholarship for Higher Education (SHE), we support them through high school and aim for college degrees and with our “Sister Aid” program we use extra funding to give more mothers micro loans and fund their daughter’s education.” – Kayoko Mitsumatsu, Founder.
Despite their financial background, these students have an immense desire to become future change-makers in their own communities, their country and the world.
Why Bhakti Chai loves this project
We believe in the power of yoga and the impact of philanthropy and see the magic that is happening with Yoga Gives Back. We are working with our local studios to help in YGB’s mission to raise awareness and funds and ask you to do the same at yours!