I am so, so, so excited to share my latest endeavor with you. I am rather disappointed with my current career path (but let's not dwell too long on that) and am always looking for inspiring projects to involve myself in during my free time to give some, any, meaning to my daily existence.
I highly recommend perusing the volunteer pages of idealist.org, where you can exercise a highly detailed search of volunteer opportunities in your community tailored to your specific interests. I was looking for fundraising/development volunteer positions when I saw these two words:
Yoga Fundraising.
Excuse me....yes please? This was a match made in heaven. And the more I learned about the project, the more I loved.
Reader's Digest version: the International Association for Human Values was born with the objective of creating sustainable solutions for villages around the world and uplifting the human spirit. One of their off-shoot projects is Nouvelle Vie Haiti, a campaign to train youth (20s or so - hooray for my age group still being identified as "youth"!) to lead their communities in sustainable development, and (and this is where my obsession truly begins) to train these youth as yoga instructors to administer the healing properties of yoga and meditation.
Nouvelle Vie Haiti's focus is centered on sustainability and working with resources a community already has. Providing psychiatric care = expensive, only reaches one individual at a time, and limits care to the Western perspective of health care. Yoga = everyone takes what they will from their practice, large numbers of people can be reached at once. And it's actually FUN, which every human could certainly benefit from.
We are currently attempting to rally New York's overwhelmingly large yoga community around NVH to raise money through yoga events in the city. I will keep you posted on our progress!
Until then, namaste and happy baby pose.
xox
