Friends and Family : American Yogis Teach Entrepreneurial Spirit to India’s Poorest Women

American Yogis Teach Entrepreneurial Spirit to India’s Poorest Women

By Susan Gunelius in Women on Business

Guest Post by Kino MacGregor Inspired by a recent trip to India and the work of Yoga Gives Back (learn more about Kino at the end of this post)

Imagine if all you needed to lift your family out of generations of poverty was two hundred dollars. You would undoubtedly have the resources and connections to secure such a modest sum between your family, friends, credit cards, bank or government assistance. But imagine if you lived in a place where not only was money not readily available but the fact of your female gender prevented you from having access to the means of acquiring a source of revenue? Welcome to India’s rural villages and meet Jayashree. She is a young, beautiful seamstress and mother of two who made just 75 dollars a month working at a garment factory to add to her husband’s meager income earned by driving a rented auto rickshaw (taxi). She dreamed of buying her husband’s rickshaw so their family could earn more money but had nowhere to turn to for the meager sum of 7,000 rupees or about 175 dollars.

Not only does Jayashree not have the education most Americans take for granted, but she also does not have the opportunities that are a vital component of earning a reasonable income. In India it seems like all Americans are rich because the money spent on groceries or on a month’s yoga classes has the potential to change the life of someone like Jayashree. The Americans most familiar with India are often the spiritual seekers who journey across land and sea to meet yoga teachers, learn meditation techniques and study ancient sacred texts. Yet for the cost of one month’s membership to the average yoga center in America a woman’s entire family could be altered forever.

Kayoko Mitsumatsu, an avid yoga practitioner who lives in California and studies with Joel Bender, thought she could make that difference in people’s lives with the creation of Yoga Gives Back. Rather than just giving money to provide shoes, food or resources, Mitsumatsu initiated this charity endeavor after interviewing Dr. Muhammad Yunus for a TV documentary about the power of micro-financing for poor women. Dr. Yunus is a Bangladeshi economist who won the Nobel Peace Price in 2006 for developing a micro-credit program through the Grameen Foundation in Bangladesh that enabled millions of mostly women to buy everything from cows to cell phones in order to earn money for their families.

Yoga Gives Back works with the Grameen Foundation in India to provide particularly destitute families in Mysore and Bangalore with the same micro-financing that has succeeded in lifting families out of poverty in Bangladesh. Mitsumatsu and Bender aim to reach the more than 15 million people (a majority of which are women) in the U.S. who practice yoga and support rural families in India. One of the reasons Yoga Gives Back focuses its efforts in the Mysore-Bangalore region of South India is because many American yoga students journey to Mysore to study with Sri K. Pattabhi Jois, the 94 year old master of the tradition. It was after a three month visit to Mysore to study yoga that Bender himself made the personal commitment to find a way to give back to the local community and upon his return partnered with Mitsumatsu to create Yoga Gives Back.

At least half the yoga practitioners in Mysore are Americans and nearly half of the world’s poorest people call India their home. While the Western world lives in relative abundance and benefits from India’s yoga legacy, nearly one in four of India’s 1.1 billion people live below the poverty threshold of less than 40 cents a day. The Western world values equality of opportunity and rewards the entrepreneurial spirit in the meritocracy of capitalist enterprise and it repays another kind of debt when yoga practitioners from the U.S. teach the most needy in India how to run their own businesses with the power of micro-credit.

The cycle of poverty in India is a vicious cycle that traps generations upon generations into an indentured servitude to a series of creditors, lenders and lessors who control the resources and money available. When a poor family falls behind and their children are forced out of school and into work they dig themselves deeper into the repetitive and prohibitive system of entrenched poverty, virtually ensuring that the next generation will be as poor, if not more than the previous one. Empowering women to find a way out of this trap opens a door to the real possibility of their happiness and self-sufficiency.

Jayashree seemed destined to perpetuate the cycle of poverty in her life until she applied for loan of 7,000 rupees or the equivalent of about 175 dollars from the Grameen Foundation and Yoga Gives Back. With the money, she bought her husband’s auto rickshaw. Whereas he previously paid rent for use of the vehicle his profit was marginal at best, but as an owner the income tripled. In one year the loan was fully repaid and Jayashree applied for a second loan to buy a sewing machine so she could sew bags and other small items to sell. Her goal is to own a garment shop and send her sons to college, and with the help of the Grameen Foundation and Yoga Gives Back, she finally had someone to turn to for the help as well as the direction and guidance she needed in order to make her dreams an attainable reality. Mitsumatsu says, “Most women only went to primary school, had to work as daily labor to help family as young child, and got married young. Like their mothers, they never had an opportunity to improve their economical situation until they had access to micro credit.”

The old axiom that says that you cannot feed the world but if you teach a person how to fish or make bread they can feed themselves for a lifetime is at work in Yoga Gives Back. More than a charity, the work is a kind of education in business for rural women with an entrepreneurial spirit. They are rewarded for their hard work, given a chance to succeed without the pressure of the unfairly high interest rates of local lenders and find a way to break the relentless cycle of poverty they were born into. Most Yoga Gives Back loans average about 25 dollars a month and with this micro-credit loan, rural, poor women start their own small businesses, buy their husband’s businesses, or invest in their already existing businesses and double or triple their incomes almost immediately. Mitsumatsu states, “Many women used to worry about having enough food for the family, or sending children to schools. But with this micro credit, their life become much more sustainable.”

Yoga helps Westerners find peace and thus make their lives more sustainable. With the power of micro-financing Yoga Gives Back helps Indian women gain access to opportunities that would otherwise simply not exist.

To read more inspirational stories about female entrepreneurs that Yoga Gives Back has helped or to contribute, please visit their website at www.yogagivesback.org.

About the Author

Kino MacGregor is a small business owner (www.miamilifecenter.com), yoga teacher and freelance journalist who has produced two yoga DVDs and is currently working on her first book, Inner Peace, Irresistible Beauty to be released late April 2009. For complete details please see www.ashtanga-awareness.com.

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Campaign To Help India's Poor

Yoga Gives Back

Written by Kayoko Mitsumatsu

From Posture To Power: Microcredit Changes Lives On Both Sides of the Ocean

We can talk about making change. But affecting real change in the world comes from impacting the lives of individuals. It comes from empowering people to be independent and able to make a living on their own while at the same time being fully integrated in our interdependent global community. Sometimes it takes something that seems to be radical to make this change, but these shifts can be deceptively small. They can be even as small (or as large) as the cost of a Los Angeles Yoga class.

How could this be? In the practice of microcredit, lending seemingly small amounts of money to small-scale entrepreneurs allows them to succeed and change their circumstances. This is the fundamental basis of microcredit’s transformative power; it’s a revolutionary concept in finance. This practice shifts the emphasis from financial transactions being focused only about large loans and large scale businesses, which are out of reach of many one-person operations, institutions and organizations – to lending practices that actually make a positive difference in a person’s life. Microcredit practices based on social justice and empowerment operate through a combination of small-scale loans based on trust and community support, with structured repayment plans and programs that encourage savings. In these situations, people actually have the opportunity to solidify long-term change in their lives.

Dr. Muhammad Yunus and the Yoga Gives Back Team: Joel Bender, Leslie Hendry, Dr. Muhammad Yunus and Kayoko Mitsumatsu (left-right)

In 2006, economist Dr. Muhammad Yunus and the institution he founded, the Grameen Bank, were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. This award was in recognition of their revolutionary efforts to create this micro-credit model, support sustainable economic practices, and provide an alternative to what were exploitive norms. When a person is caught in a cycle of poverty, they may become trapped in the system, particularly since large banking institutions have historically ignored people without assets or credit histories, who are just starting out and who may not have already proven themselves. Most banks prefer to lend large sums of money that represent a greater profit margin and are set up only for large loans in order to make a profit themselves. And even making it more challenging, people at the bottom of the economic scale worldwide have had to rely on moneylenders charging usurious terms and interest rates to obtain funds to plant the next crop, buy inventory of new equipment, or upgrade a business in any way. Institutions such as the Grameen Bank and their affiliates are offering another approach. It’s one that has significantly impacted millions of people.

As Dr. Yunus described in an exclusive interview with Yoga Gives Back in May, 2009, “We started in 1976, and today within Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, eight million people borrow micro loans, ninety-seven percent of them women.” This represents an enormous potential for change and empowerment that just did not exist on a large scale in this form prior to 1976.

There is a social cycle in economics, and Dr. Yunus explained this: “Poverty is not inside the person. Poverty is forced from outside. Poor people are as capable [a] human being as anybody else. They have the same power and energy, same potential. But they are denied such facilities. They cannot express themselves. Money is one of the most important items missing in their lives. You need a dollar to catch a dollar. You cannot catch a dollar with an empty hand. So, that first dollar, nobody has given to her. So she remains dependent on someone else. She has to be hired, to slave; she has to work to make food available on the table. What we have done, we have put that first dollar into her hands as a banking proposition. Conventional banks never come to the poor people. They go to rich people to make more money. The person who does not have a dollar – she cannot get it. So we did it. We did it in a way that is affordable to her. Because we do not insist on collateral. There is no collateral.”

While that may seem like a radical concept, the Grameen Bank has proven that their success is much more than ideological. Dr Yunus cited statistics for us, “The repayment rate is almost 100%, without collateral or anything. This is the strength of microcredit which is now spread all over the world. There are by now at least 150 million borrowers in the world today. Bu it is still very small comparing to the need. We need more microcredit organizations in the world so that more people can be reached.”

Yoga Gives Back is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization begun in LA, with the goal to provide a way for Western Yoga practitioners to give back to India, the birthplace of Yoga, which has given us so much. We’re heeding Dr. Yunus’ call to reach more people through expanded opportunities for and awareness of microcredit and have targeted India and Indian families, women, and would-be entrepreneurs, who would be otherwise stuck in the cycle of poverty that Dr. Yunus described. Yoga Gives Back supports microfinancing operations in India, through the Grameen Foundation, headquartered in Washington, DC. Donations go directly to Grameen Koota, Bangalore, South India and our YGB awareness campaign focuses on the real stories of how poor women are changing their lives with small loans from Grameen Koota.

Ms. Vinatha M Reddy

Grameen Koota was started by visionary teacher and philanthropist, Ms. Vinatha M Reddy (pictured, above) in 1999, who learned about Nobel Peace Recipient Dr Muhammad Yunus’ microfinancing and immediately began exploring ways of replicating his work in her hometown. In 2000, she started providing small microcredit loans, averaging $25.00 a month, to fifty local women. Today, Grameen Koota’s work is reaching out to over 280,000 women in Bangalore, Mysore and many areas of Karnataka state, in South India, making real impact on these women’s lives as well as on the local economy.

Yoga Gives Back

The Los Angeles-based Yoga Gives Back has a worldwide reach and began out of the inspiration and dedication of my Yoga mentor Joel Bender and me. Our group has suddenly started growing almost daily and our mission is shared by a quickly expanding and loving Yoga community.

When I was growing up in Japan, which is a very middle-class society, I had never experienced or seen any real poverty, especially growing up in Tokyo in 1960s and 1970s, when Japan's post-war economic miracle was taking place. Then, I had a chance to live in Brazil in the late 1970s for two years, where as a teenager, I saw the divide between poverty and wealth, the reality of the real slums, kids on the streets begging every time you stopped the car at the traffic light, all very much like India. Social injustice hit me hard.

Once I started Yoga practice and feeling my life being so enriched by it , I felt a need to use my resources to help others. I was producing a documentary on Social Entrepreneurship and learned about microfinancing. I shared this information with Joel [featured in the teacher profile in this month’s issue of LA YOGA] who had been looking for the way he could give back to India since his first visit there – so we teamed up.

When I think about the growth of Yoga Gives Back thus far, I give a lot of credit to the entrepreneurship and volunteer spirit of Americans, willing to embrace and support a new grass roots campaign like ours.

Kayoko Mitsumatsu, co-founder of Yoga Gives Back, is a documentary filmmaker whose films deal with social justice issues, including First They Killed My Father a memoir of a Cambodia’s Killing Fields’ survivor.

A Life Changing Story of Microcredit: Jayashree

Jayashree

Jayashree lives in the suburbs of Bangalore and is married and the mother of two children. We visited her at her humble dirt floor one room home for the first time in 2007. We were touched by her warm smile and most generous hospitality, serving us hot tea and cookies.

Jayashree was born into a very poor family in Bangalore. When she was a child, her family’s financial situation became so severe that she had to drop out of school and work at a garment factory. She toiled throughout her childhood and after she got married at fifteen, her meager earnings had to support her ailing in-laws. She had two children. Her husband’s rickshaw business was not enough to pay her sons’ education or secure food for the family.

In 2007, Jayashree learned from her neighbors about Grameen Koota’s microcredit program and applied for her first loan. She was granted a first loan of 7,000 rupees ($175), and immediately bought her husband’s auto rickshaw. Owning their own rickshaw business increased their income significantly.

Jayashree was able to pay back her entire loan in one year and became eligible for her second loan in 2008. Having proven her diligence, her second loan amount doubled to 15,000 rupees ($375). This time, she bought a sewing machine and started stitching bags. The family’s earnings have now tripled and she is earning 150 rupees ($3.75) a day. In addition, she opened a small shop next to her house to sell her products which is earning her an additional 100 rupees ($2.50) a day.

She is sending her elder son to a medical school. Her son dreams of becoming a doctor and thanks his mother’s business for providing his education, their own home and daily food.

To participate in a Yoga practice where the proceeds support Yoga Gives Back and directly impact the transformation of not only your own life, but that of someone in India, start your Thanksgiving week at Yogaglo, Sunday, November 22, 10:00 A.M. - 12 noon. Some of the teachers include John Sahakian, Felicia Tomasko, Alexandra Aiken and Ally Hamilton; more to be announced. Yogaglo.com; yogagivesback.com.

For more information on Yoga Gives Back or to host a Yoga Gives Back class at your own studio or location, visit: yogagivesback.org or contact yogagivesback@earthlink.net.