Q2 Update

June, 2021

This quarter we doubled down on our efforts to raise awareness and support important organizations including Sad Girls Club, black girls breathing, FEAST, The East Harlem Tutorial Program, Blessings In A Backpack, and The Trevor Project. We began inclusion training for our teachers, offered The Class freely a number of times a month, introduced new scholarship partners, and increased our BIPOC representation within retail.

Corporate Processes

• Our DEI Book Club for our internal team is in the middle of reading and discussing The Body is Not An Apology by Sonya Renee Taylor. 

• The Class teachers and teacher trainees began an Advance Teacher Training intensive this May and will continue for several months. These practice-based sessions focus on the seven strategies for creating safety and inclusion, specifically adapted for teaching The Class online. This training is led by Piper Anderson, President of Create Forward.

Digital Offerings

For Mental Health Awareness month, we launched The Class x Alicia Keys: Soulful Sessions. In honor of students participation, we made a donation and encouraged our community to support Sad Girls Club an NYC non-profit founded by Elyse Fox to create community and diminish stigma around mental health. They strive to support womxn of color and the millennial and Gen Z population. Sad Girls Club is also one of our scholarship partners—members of the non-profit benefit from free yearly subscriptions to The Class digital platform.

Events / Class For A Cause

To raise awareness for important organizations and make our practice more accessible, we offered the following free Classes and will continue to do so into 2021 and beyond. We are honored and humbled that thousands of you joined us to move together.

• May 20th: We had an anniversary event to celebrate our partnership with ‘black girls breathing’ and share their newest initiative: to provide free and accessible mental health care services to 1 million Black women and girls by 2025. This conversation + Class was led by Natalie Kuhn and black girls breathing founder and CEO, Jasmine Marie. 

• Juneteenth: In celebration of Juneteenth, our Teachers spotlighted their favorite Black artists in Live Class playlists throughout the day. 

• June Pride Month: The Class spotlighted eight Classes celebrating Pride led by teachers who are members of or deeply connected to the LGBTQIA+ community. 

• June 27th: Our month-long celebration will culminate with a Class for a Cause, led by Scott Dyer, to benefit The Trevor Project. 

The Class Scholarship

The Class Scholarship Program welcomed two new partner orgainzations: FEAST (a nonprofit dedicated to promoting wellness through the power of healthy foods and human connection) and The East Harlem Tutorial Program (a multi-site after-school program for public school students and a network of charter schools focused on significantly increasing the college graduation rate in East Harlem through an anti-racist and equitable learning collective). 

Retail

Representation of BIPOC owned businesses in the retail shop totals 38%. Looking specifically at individual products offered, 41% of our “digital shelf space” comprises BIPOC owned products, 23% of those from Black owned businesses. 

This past April we donated 10% of The Winter Cleanse EBook Sales to Blessings in a Backpack, a non-profit organization that feeds school children in the United States who currently are fed during the week on the federally funded Free and Reduced Meal Program and are at risk of going hungry on the weekend.

Q4 Update

December, 2020

We continue to hold ourselves accountable with seasonal updates on our commitment to change. This Autumn, we focused on rebuilding our internal foundation. Here is a look at what we’ve been up to: 

Corporate Processes

• We completed DEI training across the organization and are now making plans for quarterly DEI specific training seminars. Our focus is on deeper and more specialized anti-racism training that is workshop-driven and provides practical actions. 

• Our BLM Book club finished Me and White Supremacy and will be starting Caste by Isabel Wilkerson in January. 

• We are developing The Class Scholarship program. For every month of the Digital Studio that is purchased, we will give a month as a scholarship to someone who needs The Class. Scholars will be sourced through trusted partner organizations that will be vetted by The Class. 

• We are working diligently to improve BIPOC representation among our teaching staff. It takes six weeks to audition, three months to train, and one month of in-depth practice before new teachers graduate and teach on our digital platform. We are nearing the end of our latest teacher training which is inclusive of men, women, and the BIPOC community. As we train this new cohort of teachers, we are applying our diversity, equity, and inclusion learnings. 

Free Classes

To raise awareness for important organizations and make our practice more accessible, we freely offered the following Classes and will continue to do so into the winter and beyond. We are honored and humbled that thousands of you joined us to move together.

September 13: The Class x CCRM, led by CJ, to break through taboos, provide education, and offer support through embodiment for women navigating their fertility journey.

October 20: The Class x Black Girls Breathing, led by Taryn Toomey, we drove donations, support, and amplification for Black Girls Breathing whose aim is to create a safe space for black womxn to actively nurture their mental, emotional and spiritual health via meditational breathwork.

November 20: The Class x Project Gold, led by Natalie Kuhn, we encouraged donations to the supplies registry supporting Project Gold whose work provides outreach and services to children, mostly BIPOC, exploited in sex trafficking to help them recover from dangerous lives at the hands of traffickers and predators.

Events

As we develop programming beyond the Digital Studio, we remain committed to curating a diverse cohort of teachers, speakers, and thought leaders. 

September—The Remote Retreatment // We were thrilled to expand our teaching roster to include Jian Pablico, the Director of Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Action at Lululemon. 

October—The Summit:Wisdom of Emotions // The Class launched its first Summit that included a diverse group of 11 facilitators, 4 of whom were BIPOC thought leaders.

Scholarship opportunities were available for all programming including The Remote Retreatment, The Summit, and The Course. 

Retail

We have increased our representation of BIPOC owned businesses in the retail shop to 39%. Specifically, 25% of brands in the retail shop are Black owned businesses.