Transforming Classrooms

Yoga Foster gives teachers free and low-cost training and mats, so they can practice yoga with students.

- By Brittany Risher

In 2012, Nicole Cardoza was volunteering at P.S. 140 on the Lower East Side of Manhattan through a community initiative. When school staff learned that she practiced yoga, they approached her about sharing the practice with students. “They were looking for a way to stir the kids to move without needing a gym or going outside,” Cardoza says. Although she wasn’t a trained yoga teacher, she’d been practicing since college and found that yoga “was the first thing I did that made me feel at home in my body,” she says. “It made me feel like I was enough.” (Read more about Nicole Cardoza on page 94.)