THANK YOU FOR AN AMAZING 10 YEARS OF SERVICE.

After operating trauma-informed yoga programs in prison in the Pennsylvania region for 10 years, Transformation Yoga Project has announced that it is joining forces with Defy Ventures, a national nonprofit that provides personal development, career readiness, and entrepreneurship programs, to launch a Defy Ventures Pennsylvania chapter. 

TYP has spent the last decade teaching trauma-sensitive yoga to incarcerated individuals around the Philadelphia area to help them heal and move forward positively in their lives. Defy Ventures has 11 years of experience providing training programs to currently and formerly incarcerated individuals nationally. Both organizations seek to facilitate opportunities for healing and redemption for incarcerated people, making the new partnership a natural one.

This partnership will expand the services that Defy Ventures provides to a new population in the Pennsylvania region that TYP serves. Like other states across the country, PA suffers a high return-to-prison rate for individuals who are released from prison. According to a 2022 report by the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, 47% of individuals released from prison in 2016 returned to prison after three years. Defy Ventures as a less than 15% three-year return-to-prison rate for its graduates. The new chapter of Defy Ventures is set to launch in 2023.

“Defy Ventures shares many of the same values as Transformation Yoga Project and I am excited to enter a new phase in promoting justice work by putting our resources toward the launch of a Defy Ventures chapter in Pennsylvania. Transformation Yoga Project has had great success over the past 10 years and we’ve been at the forefront of transformative programs for people who are incarcerated. It’s a natural next step for us to partner with Defy Ventures to bring this justice work to the region.”

– Mike Huggins, TYP Founder & CEO

Contacts:

Mariah Dickinson, Director of Marketing & Communications, Defy Ventures
mariah@defyventures.org

Mike Huggins, TYP Founder
mike@transformationyogaproject.org