INTERVIEW Township YOGI
Project director Elle Matthews
What is the Township Yogi Project? It’s a non-profit organisation that we launched in February 2013, where we go into South African townships, set up grassroots yoga studios and offer free yoga classes to people living there. Classes are run by volunteer yoga
teachers who give up their time to teach on our project, but we also identify and train unemployed people from within the townships to become qualified yoga teachers. Once qualified, they’re able to take over the classes and teach their own communities, with classes generally running once or twice a week in each location.
The project started in the Inanda
Kate Cracknell talks to Elle Matthews, director of the Township Yogi Project – an initiative
that takes yoga to the townships of South
Africa in a bid to spread the calm and wellbeing that yoga can bring
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and KwaMashu townships near Durban, and has continued growing in both areas, as well as expanding into a number of other townships in that area. We also started up in Johannesburg in April and will be offering classes in Cape Town soon.
Why did you want to do this? I’d been a practitioner of yoga for a few years, but in 2012 I went on a yoga retreat to Thailand and it changed my life. I could feel the effects on my mind, body and spirit. When I returned home to South Africa, I found myself completely focused on the suffering of
July 2015 © Cybertrek 2015
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