New Leaf: Empowering Youth through Yoga

“Fear in neighbourhoods is on the rise... In some areas, people are virtual prisoners in their homes. The playgrounds are controlled by drug dealers and gang members, innocent people are put at risk because some shooters pursue their targets with no regard for innocent bystanders...  Parents are afraid to let their children participate in the community.”

“Communities, including youth, get desensitized to the violence. Young children are exposed to violence and learn from it—whether it’s at home or seeing a violent police ‘takedown.’ Children as young as nine talk about violence as normal.”

“Violence becomes an acceptable way of dealing with conflict... Youth resort to violence to resolve disputes. They feel they need to be violent in order to survive and to preserve their honour.”

“Once youth get involved in a violent lifestyle, it’s hard to get out.”

The above quotes open the first chapter of the 2008 Community Perspectives Report, or Volume III of “The Roots of Youth Violence”, by Roy McMurtry and Dr. Alvin Curling. A report responding to a review on youth violence commissioned by Premier Dalton McGuinty, the study looks at the issues affecting at-risk youth in some of the province’s most disadvantaged communities. At a time when violence amongst youth is on the rise—and, indeed, the study was ordered after the fatal shooting of 15-year-old Jordan Manners at C.W. Jefferys Collegiate Institute in 2007—co-chairs McMurtry and Curling found that Ontario sits at a crossroads when it comes to dealing with youth violence, one that depends on whether the province should strengthen the criminal justice system and further make criminals out of children, or whether it should choose to focus on prevention.  As the authors found, and according to several of the province’s police officers, choosing to continue to “arrest our way” out of the problem is not the solution.

The report goes on to suggest that there may be other ways to effectively deal with the growth of violence involving youth, ones that target the roots of the issue and which aim to break the cycle or patterns of violent behaviour. Those roots, four of which are identified as primary indicators within the report, include: “poverty, racism, the education system, [and] the lack of economic opportunity and jobs.” 

The findings of the “Roots of Youth Violence” for the most part continue to be bandied about in Ontario’s government without concrete implementation, as the fate of many such state-led initiatives. Policy reports, no matter how innovative in their recommendations, ultimately fall at the behest of the political leadership and culture in which they are born—a danger when reports that promise positive change are left to gather dust in parliamentary libraries rather than see their way to implementation. Of course, support is allocated in many instances, as example of which may be seen when the recently re-elected Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, announced early in March that the federal government would increase access to education for at-risk youth in Toronto and across the country. As part of Pathways to Education Canada, the program aims to provide tutoring, mentoring and financial assistance to students within disadvantaged communities including the Regent Park neighbourhood.

Unfortunately, the individual, ground-level results of such initiatives are often lost to the larger community after such announcements are made and elections are held. That’s where programs like New Leaf Yoga Foundation come in to the picture. For the last year, Toronto Body Mind has had the privilege of following New Leaf’s commitment to engaging youth in Ontario’s at-risk neighbourhoods through yoga and an ethic of non-violence. By striving to make yoga accessible and relevant to youth through mentorship programs, New Leaf helps youth learn new ways of dealing with not only the regular complications of teenage life, but also the hardships related to facing some of life’s greatest challenges and hardships. Sharing the practice of yoga with youth who are growing up in disadvantaged areas reflective of the four primary indicators of violence can, as New Leaf shows, help the city’s young people overcome personal histories of abuse, incarceration, addiction, violence, and gang-involvement because yoga cultivates the “seeds for peace in their lives.” By creating a means for self-empowerment in communities where their voices are often neglected, yoga can encourage personal growth and resourcefulness as well as an awareness of community. Believing that “yoga can be a powerful contributor to social change”, New Leaf hopes to inspire youth by showing them “that change on a large scale starts one person at a time.”