June 19, 2020ĭavidia Turner, who resigned from Kindness Yoga on June 17, 2020, is starting her own yoga business. And when Turner told the then-CEO, a white woman, that it was not the job of her minority employees to fix the culture, the woman began to cry, Turner said. In retrospect, Harrington says, he wishes Kindness had not staged photos but instead had sent a photographer to any of its classes.Īfter the photoshoot for minorities, several instructors expressed their outrage. After hearing that Kindness’ website was too white-centric, management then invited people of color and other minorities to an hours-long yoga photoshoot. In interviews with The Colorado Sun, yoga teachers Jordan Smiley, who is Indigenous and transgender, and Davidia Turner, who is Black, said the white management team at Kindness was not willing to put in the work to make change.įor example, Turner said, the board of directors declined to hire an outside diversity expert as she suggested, instead “cherry-picking” certain diverse members of the staff that they felt comfortable talking to about race and inclusivity. The grievances aired on social media in the last several days described - with few specifics - a culture where the voices of minorities and LGBTQ teachers were not heard. “Yoga is first a spiritual practice and second a physical practice, and just like our religious and spiritual institutions you don’t have to pay to go in,” Harrington explained.īut outside the public space of yoga class, some teachers who identify as gay or trans or as BIPOC (Black or Indigenous people of color) were asking for change and said they got no meaningful response from management. The company’s donation-based model meant that all were welcome, regardless of their ability to pay.
Kindness Yoga, which began in 2001 with one Cherry Creek studio called Yoga Energi, had an outward reputation of inclusivity - with its earthy studios in Capitol Hill and Hilltop, gender-neutral bathrooms and person-of-color yoga nights where “white friends and allies” were asked to “respectfully refrain from attending.” Kindness held an LGBTQ yoga workshop just weeks before the pandemic forced the studios to close. “I hear you and I will do better personally.” “White friends and allies” not invited He apologized to the yoga teachers who said Kindness wasn’t a safe space, and said he had no “ill will towards the former employees (from) whom I am learning humility and listening.” The membership cancellations made “what was going to be a monumental task in reopening near impossible,” he said in an Instagram post and email shared with his 1,300 members and hundreds of other drop-in yoga students. Harrington, 47, announced June 19 that Kindness was closing and that it would not reopen on July 1 as planned.
“I felt like it was an out-of-body experience.” “It happened like an avalanche,” said Harrington on Thursday, as he sat at the highest point of a park in an east Denver neighborhood now going through a name change because Benjamin Stapleton, the former mayor it’s named after, was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Harrington and his wife, Cameron, are now putting their Denver home on the market to dig out of the financial hole. The membership cancellations were more than the business could withstand. June 1, 2020Īlready operating in the red, Kindness was struggling to make it through the three-month pandemic shutdown. Harrington has yet to read all of them, but with each one he opened, the direction his already precarious business was heading grew ever more clear. A week later, the emails had reached 800 and counting. Within 48 hours, as the nightly protests over police violence unfolded around the Capitol in Denver, just three blocks from Kindness’ Capitol Hill studio, the yoga company received nearly 400 emails from students who were upset, including many wanting to cancel their memberships. Harrington, a straight, white guy who expanded Kindness to nine studios and 160 employees across metro Denver, announced last week that he was closing them all after a handful of yoga teachers, including a Black woman and a transgender man, called out Kindness on social media for “performative activism” and “tokenization of Black and brown bodies.” The teachers’ public comments, following a Black Lives Matter post on Kindness’ Instagram page that they termed too little, too late, evoked a backlash that was fierce and immediate. Kindness Yoga founder Patrick Harrington talks to The Colorado Sun at Denver’s Central Park on June 25, 2020. Kindness Yoga called out: Weakened by coronavirus, 9 studios close after Instagram campaign exposes rift over race - The Colorado Sun Close
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