This program is approved by the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) and Yoga Alliance for 14 hours of Continuing Education Units.

Our Core Teacher training will focus on teaching the skills needed to serve youth with yoga, meditation and other mindfulness practices.

In this training, you will receive practical, real world knowledge and techniques that will assist you in teaching at-risk youth. You will also be encouraged to dig into your personal experience in order to draw out your own courage and compassion as a teacher.

Street Yoga does not prescribe a strict methodology for bringing yoga to youth. Instead, we will cover the basic techniques we have found most useful and will present a brief sketch of the challenges faced by these young people. You can expect to learn:

• Population characteristics and backgrounds
• Communication techniques, including conflict prevention and de-escalation
• Useful yoga postures and sequences, including ideas for special populations
• Common challenges to creating and maintaining a yoga program for youth
• How to work effectively with organizations and use resources efficiently

Intention

Going into the training, we see three goals, for which we set our intention:

• That you will develop your confidence and skills to teach youth in a variety of situations.  
• That you will better understand the connections between youth homelessness, and foster care, a history of childhood abuse, addiction, family rejection and poverty.
• That you will feel inspired to volunteer to teach yoga to homeless and marginalized youth in one of our programs, or to create a program of your own in your part of the world.

The youth we serve at Street Yoga, whose lives inform this training, include:

• Youth in Foster Care
• Homeless school children
• Youth living on the streets
• Runaway youth
• Youth in transitional housing programs
• Youth in sexual abuse treatment programs
• Youth in detention
• Youth in addiction recovery programs
• Young mothers in shelters
• Children in shelters
• Youth in low income and transitional housing

Learning Objectives

After this training, participants will be able to:

• explain why they want to be of service teaching yoga
• teach a full yoga class to homeless youth using appropriate language, asanas, and pacing
• articulate various causes and challenges of youth homelessness
• describe the continuum of homelessness
• identify potential boundary issues with clients and describe appropriate responses
• identify the importance of having a community of support for expanding into this work
• create a youth yoga program in collaboration with local social service providers. 

All participants will receive a 64 page manual that supports these objectives, and provides background material for the training.

Intended Audience

This training is geared towards two primary groups of people:

• Social Workers, Teachers, Health Care practitioners, and others who wish to learn how better to serve the youth in their care
• Yoga Teachers who wish to expand their ability to be of service through yoga.

The training also includes self-inquiry, communication and mindfulness skills that are useful for everyone.  As we noted in a recent email to one participant:

"What we do teach is how you can teach from what you do know, how you can take your yoga experience, your life skills, your passion to serve young people and weave that together into a practice that will bring the amazing benefits of yoga to the people you teach. One of the things we do is work on getting ourselves to see yoga not as 90 minutes on the mat in a studio, but so much more: it could be five minutes in a hallway with one kid, helping her breathe and calm down before she meets a probation officer. it could be working with 8 young people at a shelter and simply doing warrior pose, downward dog, some stretches, some breathing and a long savasana. could be working with staff to help them ground and center in their own breathing. there are so many ways we use yoga in our own lives without realizing it, and a big part of the training is to help you tease out all those glories and find ways to share them with others."

What Others Have Said about the Training

• It gave me the tools and confidence to teach others and to feel what it's like to spend my day dedicated to yoga. I went home so joyful every day and it was obvious to others.
• Incredible!
• Very helpful, informative and inspirational.

In 2011, we trained over 500 yoga teachers to teach yoga to youth in social service environments; we offered weekend workshops in Portland, Seattle, San Diego, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Tucson, Washington D.C., Minneapolis, Boston, Bend, OR, Salt Lake City, Belfast, Spokane, and Toronto, Canada.

Trainers

Street Yoga trainings will be led by Mark Lilly, Director and Founder of Street Yoga, and Katie Arrants.  Mark and Katie come to trainees with over a decade of experience teaching yoga. They have also received training in a wide variety of mindfulness disciplines, including yoga, meditation, and "non violent communication." Both Mark and Katie have worked intensively with homeless and at-risk youth and hold dearly the belief that sharing yoga with marginalized populations is a key step in the journey toward a more peaceful, egalitarian society.

Mark Lilly, Lead Trainer, Street Yoga Founder and Board President 

Mark Lilly is a mindfulness and communication trainer who has taught workshops all over North America to widely diverse audiences including physicians, nurses, social workers, police officers, therapists, mental health workers and countless others. Mark is the founder and Board President of Street Yoga, an internationally recognized non-profit which provides yoga and mindfulness classes to at-risk populations in Portland and Seattle.

Mark has extensive expertise in community- as well as hospital-based mindfulness practices, and is initiating Mindful Communication workshops for physicians, along with similar trainings for nurses and social workers. In addition to ongoing work with Street Yoga, he has developed the practice of Body-Mind Rehab Therapy, which he currently offers to pediatric inpatients recovering from significant illness or injury, at Portland's Emanuel Hospital. He is also co-creator of the Mindful Parents & Caregiver program which serves social workers and their client families with practical, everyday mindfulness.

Mark has developed many specialized mindfulness curricula in addition to the core and advanced Street Yoga trainings, including specialized work for young people recovering from sexual abuse, and workshops for adults moving through entrenched traumas or grappling with high-intensity communication situations.

For Mark, yoga is an everyday survival skill, a practice he has shared with thousands of youth through Street Yoga. He still lives with the tremors of traumas past and realizes the delicate line between suffering and awakening. His teaching emphasizes cultivation of the best within each of us by using the authentic stories and experiences that illuminate our being and drive our teaching to places of deep truthfulness.

Mark has developed the core and advanced Street Yoga trainings as well a yoga curricula used for specialized work with young patients recovering from illness or injury in the hospital, for young people recovering from sexual abuse, and workshops for adults moving through entrenched traumas or grappling with high-intensity communication situations.

Through it all, he brings a lightness and love to his  teaching that is rooted in humility, grace and joy.

Katie Arrants, Lead Street Yoga Trainer

Katie Arrants has been teaching and training Street Yoga volunteers since she developed the original Street Yoga teacher training in 2005.  Katie has trained over 200 yoga instructors in cities across the nation, providing her students with a rich and challenging learning environment. She infuses her teaching with a calm, grounded, real-world approach to combining mindfulness and youth work. Katie is also currently chartering Street Yoga’s first chapter in Seattle.

As a Street Yoga trainer, Katie draws on over 8 years of direct social work experience and currently stays active in the field of social work as a Case Manager for foster youth.  In this job, Katie helps youth transition to independent lives as they are aging out of foster care, a time of life in which foster youth become extremely vulnerable and are at high risk for homelessness. She carries a diverse and heavy caseload of youth with concerns ranging from mental illness to criminal backgrounds, trauma victims to teen parents. Some of her specialties include homelessness prevention, skill development, family reunification, community collaboration, and motivational interviewing for personal change.

Katie is also trained in Non-Violent Communication and de-escalation techniques.Katie has over a decade of yoga teaching experience and completed her RYT-200 in 2004. She has taught at the Omega Institute’s Being Yoga Conference and the National Health Care for the Homeless Conference. She has completed graduate work in Sociology at the Salt Institute and will begin an MSW program in fall 2010.
With her gentle and light-hearted approach, Katie strives to develop knowledge, confidence, and enthusiasm in all her students, so they can achieve their highest potential.

TJ Wildenborg, Street Yoga Trainer

TJ has been a volunteer yoga teacher with Street Yoga in Portland, Oregon since 2004. He received his BS in Psychology and Philosophy from the University of Wisconsin-Platteville, in 2002. He is a certified Ananda yoga instructor and is an Experienced Registered Yoga Teacher (E-RYT) with the Yoga Alliance.

TJ began a career in the mental health field working at a residential treatment facility for teenagers with co-occurring drug addiction and mental health issues. Having the opportunity to explore the use of yoga with this population, TJ brought this experience to Street Yoga trainings over the last two years, with the hope that others may benefit as they seek to serve youth with yoga. Gaining Oregon State certification as a Drug and Alcohol Counselor has brought further knowledge and focus for TJ in the application of yoga in a supportive and therapeutic setting.

He tells that he felt a calling to Portland to work specifically with youth experiencing the struggles of homelessness, while working to alleviate the social injustices that cause homelessness. When TJ discovered Mark Lilly, founder of Street Yoga, and Mark’s work with homeless youth, TJ saw an amazing opportunity. He was able to utilize his yoga training to support these youth at various social service agencies, including Outside In, an outreach center and medical clinic for young adults struggling with homelessness. His involvement with Street Yoga had made it possible to bring the very simple and basic human practices of yoga to populations that have been dehumanized in many ways. It is with a gracious heart that TJ continues to commit to the mission and work of this important yoga service organization.

TJ currently volunteers with Street Yoga to teach a free Recovery Yoga class in Portland for community members experiencing addiction and/or recovery. He is also a Graduate Mentor in the University Studies program and a candidate for the Masters of Social Work at Portland State University. His greatest work is currently being undertaken in conjunction with his wife, Lori, and 17-month-old, Lucia, entitled, “Lifetime is Playtime” and takes place in his living-room and backyard, daily.

* Please note, these states do not accept National CE approval programs and require alternate processes:  CA, MI, NC, OH WV
Please contact Street Yoga if you are in these states and we can provide adequate resources.

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Please note that trainings fill quickly. Click here to fill out the application.

If you have any questions, just drop us a line.

Thank you, Namaste.