Friends and Family : Voyage LA Interviews Kayoko Mitsumatsu

Voyage LA Interviews Kayoko Mitsumatsu

Kayoko, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
Prior to moving to the USA in 1992, I was a producer/director for NHK Japan’s National Public Broadcaster, working on prime-time national broadcast current affairs and documentary television programs for seven years; and cultural attaché at the Embassy of Japan in London for two years. My passion for documentary filmmaking to bridge diverse values and cultures was rooted in my perspective gained from years of living abroad including Australia, Brazil, United Kingdom and USA.

In 2006, I was just starting daily yoga practice for the first time while working on a documentary project about Social Entrepreneurship which opened my eyes to Nobel Peace Price Recipient Dr Muhammad Yunus’ revolutionary micro-financing. As I began to learn yoga asana and philosophy, it hit me very hard that I needed to use all my capacity to help others, especially the underserved population in India, motherland of YOGA, as I was benefiting so much from the daily practice of Yoga. I was feeling so blessed! I shared this idea with my yoga teacher and the studio manager who all supported the idea. That’s how Yoga Gives Back was born.

There were many charity organizations within the yoga community, but there was none that focused on giving back to India, especially to confront the serious issues of poverty. As we started sharing this campaign of gratitude at local fundraising classes in Los Angeles, I was surprised and inspired with passionate responses from the yoga community. I truly felt that there was a strong need in the community to express its gratitude for the gift of yoga but many of us did not know how. It was also clear that the economic imbalance was so lopsided that impoverished mothers will never even have a chance to relax with yoga practice in India, while so many of us, an estimated 300 million world wide practitioners today, enjoy this practice mainly for self-care, generating an estimated 80 billion dollars.

In the last thirteen years, Yoga Gives Back has spread to over 20 countries with 150 Ambassadors who are yoga teachers sharing YGB’s mission with their communities as well as raising funds with their events. We have also created a community of partnering sponsors whose annual contribution also tremendously support our mission.

With this growing global yoga community’s support, we are now empowering nearly 1400 women and children in India with a minimum of five-year commitment to each recipient. Today, we provide microloans to nearly 500 women and education funds to young children as well as SHE Scholarship for Higher Education for 300 youths in Karnataka and West Bengal.

Our goal is to reach to #OneMillionYogis to join our campaign so we can create much bigger impact to many more lives. Over the last decade, we have proven that we can transform so many lives if we come together at the cost of just one yoga class.

I invite everyone who benefits from the practice of yoga whether physical or spiritual, to join Yoga Gives Back!

Has it been a smooth road?
Our journey of the last thirteen years has been trial and error and I never imagined that YGB would reach to 20 countries which enables us to empower nearly 1400 lives in India. If anything, my constant challenge is the shortage of operational budget. As a founder and executive director of this grassroots nonprofit organization, I continue to manage over 90% of the entire operation. My biggest struggle is that we lack a robust marketing budget which makes it harder for us to reach out to larger audience globally. Our goal is to reach out to One Million Yogis, out of an estimated three hundred million yogis in the world, to join in our campaign to make a massive impact on many more lives in India. It is like the chicken and egg debate. If we do not invest in marketing, we can not reach out to such a wide audience. We have been growing at a slow but steady pace, and I hope we can find resources to develop a more impactful outreach strategy, as I am confident that YGB’s potential is huge. We just need more capital to fully express it.

So, as you know, we’re impressed with Yoga Gives Back – tell our readers more, for example what you’re most proud of and what sets you apart from others.
Yoga Gives Back (YGB) is a Los Angeles based nonprofit organization, which engages global yoga communities with their personal feelings of gratitude to give back to Mother India, for the gift of yoga. We raise awareness and funds to empower underserved women and children in India. YGB is unique in uniting all yoga practitioners regardless of branch or school with one simple cause, GRATITUDE. I am proud that we have been able to reach out to yoga communities in so many countries which support nearly 1400 underserved women and children in India with microloans and education funds.

YGB is also unique in connecting our global supporters directly to the fund recipients in India through regular updates of stories with photos and videos on social media and regular newsletters, so global supporters can see how everyone’s contributions are truly making tremendous difference in our recipients’ lives. We also have dozens of short documentary YGB FILMS which I have been filming and producing since 2007 to share how so many lives have been transformed with their dreams coming true. I am proud of Yoga Gives Back as it is the only charity within the global yoga community which focuses on giving back to India and empowering lives with our gratitude. We also empower ourselves by empowering others – that is a truly wonderful lesson.

I would like to add also that YGB holds Los Angeles Headquarters’ Annual Gala every fall as the main fundraising and community event, hosted generously by Glo (aka YogaGlo). We are proud to have presented our annual Namaste Awards personally to Mallika Chopra, David Lynch, Alanis Morrisette, Primal Shah, and The Pad Project, the Oscar-winning team of the short documentary “Period End of Sentence.” We are excited to present this humanitarian award to Jack Kornfield and Trudy Goodman this fall, Sunday, September 13th. Please save the date. This special event is also a testament how YGB has been able to unite diverse local yoga communities with one simple mission of gratitude – and this mission keeps growing.

Let’s touch on your thoughts about our city – what do you like the most and least?
I love Los Angeles for its diversity and the spirit of entrepreneurship. YGB was able to grow from Los Angeles to a global campaign thanks to tremendous energy and spirit of entrepreneurship in the community which accepts new ideas and supports it regardless of where you are from, how old you are, or what your background is. I was truly struck by the positive response YGB had received in the first years. People simply expressed that it was a great idea and started supporting it, which I truly appreciated it. Los Angeles is also very special for a yoga practitioner, as it is a global yoga mecca with so many pioneering and leading teachers whether asana or spiritual practices. I always feel Los Angeles has a very special energy as here is where Vivikananda and Yogananda seeded YOGA for the West. It is truly a special place in the history of YOGA.

What I like least is the lack of public transportation, which is slowly improving.

Donate

$5 a month can provide education materials for 12 young students
$15 a month can offer higher education for 1 teen student
$100 a month can offer a caring home and education for 2 orphaned children

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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.