Since 2007, New Leaf Yoga Foundation has been an innovator in Canada supporting the mental, emotional, and physical well-being of youth through programs utilizing yoga and mindfulness-based practices. Our focus is working within priority schools, low-income communities, and youth justice settings in the Greater Toronto Area and southern Ontario.
In this introductory training, New Leaf’s Co-founder and Senior Program Facilitators will share our best practices for making yoga accessible and relevant for young people in diverse and sensitive environments. The training will primarily focus on approaches for youth aged 10-20 years, but the material can be adapted for younger age groups or other demographics.
Learning Objectives
- Understand the importance of anti-oppression practices in yoga service work
- Learn a trauma-informed framework for offering yoga and mindfulness-based practices
- Recognize behavioral issues from a trauma-informed perspective
- Develop skills for engaging youth, working with resistance and other challenges
- Build capacity for active listening, healthy boundaries, and strengths/resilience-based approaches
- Design sessions utilizing New Leaf’s class model
- Create self-care strategies
Learning Methods
- Lectures on teaching pedagogy
- Experiential mindfulness and physical yoga practices
- Practice teaching
- Small group/partner work
- Self-reflection exercises
Each participant will receive a copy of New Leaf Yoga Foundations’s Teaching Guide.
We recommend that participants have a minimum 200-hour yoga teaching certification. If you are not a certified yoga teacher but would like to attend, please complete this form.
January 29-31, 2016
Spirit Loft (290 Carlaw Ave, Toront0)
$325 Early-bird (until Dec 22) / $375 Regular
All proceeds go to support our yoga programs for youth in marginalized communities. Limited sliding scale spaces are available. Please email us for details.
Daily Schedule
Friday 6pm - 9pm
Saturday 1:30pm - 7:30pm
Sunday 10am - 5:30pm
Faculty
This training will be facilitated by the senior New Leaf Yoga Foundation program team. The primary instructors for this training are Laura Sygrove and Julia Gibran, with guest faculty Jamilah Malika, and Andre Talbot. They have years of combined mindfulness/yoga practice and experience supporting and working with youth in under-served environments.
Laura Sygrove is Co-founder and Executive Director of NLYF. She brings 9 years of experience developing New Leaf programming, training teachers, studying trauma-informed approaches to offering yoga, and working primarily with youth in custody.
Julia Gibran is a Senior Program Facilitator and Teacher Trainer with NLYF and has been teaching yoga in studios and to youth for almost a decade. Her degree in education fuels a passion for social activism and offering yoga to youth who have experienced trauma.
Jamilah Malika is a Senior Program Facilitator at NLYF, published author/poet, ex-performing artist, yoga teacher, and community educator. She self-identifies as a cis hetero woman of colour (Indo-Trini Nigerian). She was a co-visionary of Positive Space Initiatives at a downtown Toronto yoga studio. Her teaching experience includes teaching youth writing and performance poetry in schools, arts/activism programs, and guiding groups on the fringes of yoga studios - youth, retired sex workers, women of colour, Native moms - thanks to community programming.
Andre Talbot is a Senior Program Facilitator and Teaching Mentor with NLYF. After a 10-year career as a professional football player, he found solace and transformation through the practices of yoga, mindfulness, and meditation. He has since been dedicated to sharing these practices with youth in the communities that need it most. Andre is also co-founder of Spirit Loft, a local Toronto-based yoga and movement studio.
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