Yoga Alliance Foundation

Through collaboration, investment, and advocacy, Yoga Alliance Foundation helps bring yoga to more spaces and communities—making the practice accessible to everyone, regardless of their resources or life circumstances, for greater collective health and wellbeing.

We leverage yoga for social impact and foster a more expansive, accessible, and equitable yoga community.

We concentrate our efforts and resources on individuals and communities who face barriers to accessing yoga and who have experienced marginalization. We focus on current / prospective yoga teachers and practitioners who face economic, geographic, or cultural barriers to yoga classes or teacher training, and on those who have experienced discrimination and exclusion in yoga settings.

Our two approaches are: investment in change-makers who expand access to the practice; and partnership with other sectors and social programs seeking to integrate yoga into their work.

We invest in change-makers by providing funding, community connection, and business-building support to yoga professionals who come from and share the practice with historically marginalized communities.

We use our infrastructure and networks to amplify and scale this work—while maintaining a community-centered approach and long-term visioning.

We provide accessible, science-based tools to measure yoga’s impact on health and wellbeing.

We partner with leaders from other sectors to sustainably integrate yoga into their core services, using impact data to demonstrate yoga’s high return on investment.

We fill a unique role within the landscape of yoga social impact organizations. There are many yoga outreach initiatives led by individuals or small organizations; Yoga Alliance Foundation complements these efforts as a connector and amplifier, simultaneously investing in grassroots-level action, and advocating for systems change. We also reach beyond the yoga community, forging relationships with other institutions. We weave these networks together to drive community-driven change and embed it into policy and systems for long-term impact.

We have been using yoga to address systemic health inequities on three levels:
(1) We invest in the yoga professional pipeline by financing scholarships for economically disadvantaged BIPOC teacher trainees. In 2021-2022 we contributed $125,000 to community-based programs supporting 100+ BIPOC trainees.
(2) As part of our pandemic response, we invested to sustain yoga in historically marginalized communities – taught by community members. From 2021-2023 we made small grants totaling $225,000 (plus business support services) to 125 teachers, who shared the practice with ~5,500 people in historically marginalized communities.
(3) We collaborate with other sectors (e.g., education, social services, health care) seeking to deepen their impact with yoga. These partnerships can expand the market for yoga teachers, increasing economic opportunity while improving community health and wellbeing.

Our organization has contributed to greater diversity in yoga, improved physical and mental health among those who have experienced trauma and marginalization, increased economic potential for yoga professionals from historically marginalized communities, and a growing support network of yoga professionals who have experienced exclusion.