Please join us and help support the Acorn Fund:

January 21st – Yoga Mala – 108 Sun Salutations at 889 Yonge 1-3pm.

February 15th – Spynga-thon – Spinning and Yoga 2 hour class at Sypnga South.

The Acorn Fund was formed with a general intention of stimulating and experiencing our yoga community’s interest in sharing resources for shared philanthropic concerns.

Acorn Fund Grantee Profile: Yoga-educated and experienced applicants who are ready to take their contemplative life-work and self-healing into the context of social activism.

The Acorn Fund places priority on supporting projects that seek to demystify, legitimize, and naturalize yogic practice and thought in the public sphere. Community health, rehabilitation, employment and transition services, public education, continuing-education, youth and children’s services, environmental awareness and public space topics, for the elevation of marginalized demographics through an improved quality of life, exemplify possible key areas of focus.

In 2009, New Leaf was the first recipient of an Acorn Fund grant. New Leaf Yoga is a charitable organization that was founded in Toronto in 2007. “We bring yoga, including meditation, to youth who are incarcerated or considered “at risk” in Ontario. The youth we work with face some of life’s biggest challenges, including abuse, poverty, addiction, marginalization, crime and very often a lack of family and community support. New Leafsees a bright future in these young people and aspires to help them realize their potential by recognizing the resources they hold within themselves” – Laura Sygrove, co-founder. This grant is being renewed to aidNew Leaf in their project Breaking the Cycle, youth gang-exit and ambassador program in Rexdale.

Our new recipients for 2010 are The Center of Gravity Peacemakers.

The Centre of Gravity is an existing and thriving community of secular yoga & Buddhist practitioners in Toronto led by Michael Stone, whose books, research, and teaching explore the intersection of committed spiritual practice and social action. In 2011 The Center of Gravity is becoming a non-profit learning centre, re-located within an affordable housing operation. The Acorn Fund grant will be used to fund their work with healthcare clinicians, social service frontline workers, and their clients in partnership with St. Clare Multifaith Housing, which started in the 90′s as the Toronto Action for Social Change (TASC) working with homeless street youth and evolved into St. Clare’s, a successful affordable housing organization serving Parkdale area and the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.

Donate to the Acorn Fund

Yoga Community Toronto is a non-profit, volunteer-run, organization.  The YOCOTO is always developing new projects to help build yoga community and respond to the needs of that community.  This year we are looking for volunteers to help us manage and create our 9 projects this year.  To find out how to become a part of the yoga community toronto staff please contact me.

1. Acorn Fund – supporting socially-engaged yoga outreach and community based projects.  The acorn fund is 100% supported by donation.  We receive no funding other than what we can raise ourselves through fundraising events.  To learn more about the acorn fund follow this link.  We are looking to have two fundraising events in 2012.  if you would like to get involved and help the Acorn Fund please contact me.

2. Yoga Festival Toronto – November 2012.  This year’s festival will move from its home of the last 4 years at the National Ballet School and back to the community roots from which it was born.  We are taking the festival to you this year.  The Yoga Festival Toronto will be hosted by local studios.  A single pass will get you entrance to all the lectures and classes that are going on that weekend.  To volunteer for the festival please visit the volunteer section of our website. The Festival will also be held in November of this year as we listened to the feedback you gave us about August being a difficult time of year for many of you to attend.

3. Yoga General Assemblies and Yoga Town Hall Meetings – The bi-monthly YGA and YTHM meetings are held at various studios throughout the city.  These meeting help connect practitioners and offer a platform to voice concerns and present new ideas. If your studio wishes to participate by hosting one of these events please contact me.

4. Toward a Code of Ethics for Toronto Yoga Practitioners, Teachers and Studios. The YOCOTO will be providing free ethics workshops to all studios to have their teachers participate and as a community we will work together to build a Code of Ethics that we can all stand by. If you are interested in helping out with this project please contact me.

5. Yoga For All – the goal of the YFA is to help students who cannot afford to take classes to receive discounts.  We are calling on all studios to help get involved with this project.  We are suggesting that anyone with Social Assistance identification should receive a discount at yoga studios.  If you would like to help support this project and help those members of our society that cannot afford yoga but would could otherwise benefit from its practice please contact me.

6. Yoga Teacher Support Program – We would like to create a mentorship program for recent Yoga Teacher Training graduates that links them with senior teachers in the community to help offer them support and guidance as they become teachers.  This mentorship program is volunteer-based.  If you would like to be a part of this program and offer your time to help mentor a new teacher or if you are looking for a mentor please contact me.

7. DeepRoots – A Yoga Community project to help studios who pay high rent to purchase their own studio property through co-op ownership by the community.  In a time when studios are closing their doors due to high rents and overhead, this project has as it goal the overall longterm longevity and sustainability of the entire community. If you would like to be a part of the project please contact me.

8. Seva Program – Can yoga studios do more than offer classes?  Could studios also serve as community centres during off hours?  What would it look like if our yoga studios became hubs of community participation and outreach. This project would like to support and create initiatives for community outreach programs within studio culture.

“yoga 2.0 is not just about yoga; it speaks to the meaning and method of all spiritualities, all methods of conscious evolution.”

The 1.0 OS of yoga has rolled out 6 versions: 1.1: the shamanic. 1.2: the vedic. 1.3: the ascetic. 1.4: the scholastic. 1.5 the tantric. 1.6 the modern.

Our globally connected and hyper-relational age, faced with an urgent ecological crisis, has forced a complete version upgrade: yoga 2.0 — the empathetic.

2.0 is building itself with retrofit flexibility: it should run (with a few bugs, certainly) on any of the six previous 1.0 systems. 2.0 knows that yoga users will always straddle multiple worlds and platforms.

Our first book written on 2.0 OS is called shamanic echoes.  It’s a good book — and strange.  It looks at yoga through the lenses of evolutionary biology and postmodern bafflement.  And we’re supporting its principles by rolling out embodiment workshops.   (See our schedule.)

But what we really want is to start a global discussion, and foster an open-source method for inquiry into what yoga is here and now.  We want everyone who takes part to table their expertise: from neuroscience to social science, from linguistics to robotics, from social networking to lyric poetry, from contemplating the one, to enjoying the many.

We’re not starting something new, but rather uncovering something that’s already happening to us all.

As modern yogis, we are scavengers, recyclers, and rebuilders. We’re practitioners, therapists, community organizers, philosophers, and friends.

We invite you to join our table, and our various feeds.