How the coronavirus became the catalyst behind YI’s recommitment to Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion

Chronicling the roller coaster of changes in 2020 that had us refocus on our values and recommit to our mission for serving Yoga online.

Like most businesses, Yoga International’s operations came to a halt in March 2020 due to the coronavirus. We practiced deep breaths, surveying how the pandemic would affect our business, realizing the ways in which the shutdowns would grossly affect our industry: yoga studios and yoga teachers alike. We reached out to our platform’s core teachers who are also yoga studio owners to see how they were handling the pandemic and also to our core teachers who regularly travel, delivering classes, trainings, and workshops internationally. The replies back were devastating; people realized that their existing methods to earn income were no longer sustainable if face-to-face interactions were no longer the norm.

We also reached out to fans and members, and it became apparent that they too would be affected. Questions like: “Where will yoga practitioners meet now?” and “How will their practice be affected?” quickly came up. So we asked ourselves, “What kind of normalcy can we provide in the interim?”

We responded with urgency, moving many of our late 2020–2021 projects to the front burner in order to meet our industry’s and our audience’s demands. These were projects that had been in tentative development at our headquarters in Honesdale, Pennsylvania, for over a year with the aim to help studios get on board with the trends of online yoga and to put some equity back into the hands of individual yoga teachers — who are often the major draw of most studios. These projects now became top priority to position for launch. This was the beginning of a roller coaster of internal and external changes that had us refocus and recommit to why Yoga International (which began as a print magazine) went digital in the first place back in 2015.

THE RADICAL SHIFT

As an aid to transitioning yoga studios online, we launched the Community Partner Program (CPP) to help acclimate brick and mortar studio owners to the process of developing an online presence and giving them our platform to leverage from in distributing classes with worldwide reach. It also gave yoga teachers — many without a home studio, due to immediate closures — opportunities to learn the inner workings of production and content design.

Funneling fears into fruitful new endeavors

With the CPP came a learning curve and re-education about income streams through content distribution — not a familiar concept in traditional settings within our industry. This gesture to collaborate was initially met with apprehension from many teachers wondering, “What’s in it for YI?” assuming we were looking to gain more from the project than give. To address concerns about teacher compensation, we upgraded the CPP program to enable a “tip” feature that would grant students the ability to offer immediate monetary appreciation directly to a teacher or the studio’s Venmo or PayPal account, without pass-through fees, in order to further connect our audience and our partners in a proactive manner that made a financial difference while building trust.

By amplifying the platforms of like-minded teachers and studios, we created a database of teachers and teaching styles that we couldn’t have met or witnessed before, both in our English and Spanish divisions. This connection to real people teaching daily yoga classes sparked the interest of our organization to recommit to our mission: Yoga for Everybody — to make our platform inclusive and diverse while also making it accessible and convenient for all. CPP showed us that there is a bevy of talent that we were missing out on in the world, and we needed to make our efforts one step bolder; born from CPP came MoveTogetherLive.

Pivoting in real-time

On April 8, less than one month after the mandated quarantine took effect in the U.S., MoveTogetherLive arrived full steam ahead. We had our core teachers headline the event: an entire month of fully curated live-streamed daily yoga practices led by international teachers. Using innovative functionality, we were able to beam our teachers’ methods from their lens to our audience’s screens in real-time, and by the end of spring, it was creating a heat wave.

Behind the scenes, our video production, content production, creative, and marketing teams fanned the flames, making each week better than the last. All hands were on deck in creating the process of in-house production. Typically, filming in our studios can have a life cycle of eight to twelve weeks. With MoveTogetherLive we condensed our production time into eight days. Because our content cycles had rapidly increased, we had to be sharper, more decisive, and more agile than ever.

Fielding teachers from CPP alongside recruiting efforts by our content producers granted us access to more teachers and a wider breadth of talent, skills, and representation. We began to realize how much we had been missing the mark when it came to diversity and inclusivity on our platform and how much this live-stream option erased barriers that had prevented us from doing more in those areas in the first place.

With monthly offerings and a revolving pool of talent to showcase, we innovated an effective method of serving our audience unparalleled consistency and exceptional offerings of inclusive yoga classes taught by astute teachers of wide ranges: multiculturalism is better represented and with equitable support from our production and marketing team. We were finally able to fully show up and serve our mission with pride: to inspire people around the world to practice and heal as individuals and communities.

Being the teacher, the student, and the witness

It became pivotal to transition our temporary solution for the coronavirus’s halted production into a permanent footprint when the reality of civil unrest and peaceful protest due to the unfortunate and unjust deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, coinciding with the Indigenous Peoples of North America’s protest to rename sports teams and continued efforts to unmask the hidden history of torment, national terrorism, and marginalization in America. The global agitation to right the wrongs was fervent, and upon self-reflection, Yoga International realized we were not immune to the same transgressions of marginalizing and appropriating cultures.

In our industry, there lies a systematic centering of specific body types, races, voices, and points of view too often positioned as the only “experts” in yoga. This July, we showcased a diverse range of teachers from various underrepresented communities only to learn that we have played a role in perpetuating that stigma in yoga. Instead of just sharing the screen and standing in solidarity, we got schooled on representing yoga better (more on that in an upcoming blog post). In that self-reflection, we created more prominent roles in order to keep our organization accountable for the inclusivity we should have been cultivating all along.

As MoveTogetherLive continued to grow, we sparked an internal conversation on redesigning our own business structure from just advocating for equality to being equitable on every front.

The more we pivoted, the more we aligned ourselves

Expanding on the scope of People Operations, we devised a strategy to continue working distributed while re-assessing our team’s roles and responsibilities. By adopting a bottom-up approach into our flat organizational hierarchy, we could reduce redundancies, promote from within, and create opportunities to hire more contributors to our team. We addressed pay scale inequities and standardized operating protocols. We partnered with outside agencies to welcome fresh perspectives and talent and to cultivate yoga’s rich culture throughout Yoga International (with employees, contractors, and partners all working safely from home). We adopted new technology to improve communication as our team expanded into Mexico, California, Ontario, The Netherlands, and the Northeastern U.S.

In summary, the coronavirus shifted Yoga International into becoming a more agile organization, better able to meet our audience’s need to practice at home, and our internal contributors’ need to create content smartly and safely. Collectively, we have become a more robust team due to the coronavirus’s paradigm shift and becoming more aligned with what’s really important, all inspired with deep breaths.

Written by Janessa Mondestin, Director of People & Culture at Yoga International