Bringing free community yoga to Cleveland neighborhoods

Kimberly Archibald-Russell had just gotten her yoga certification and needed somewhere to teach. So she called her people – they had always called themselves the village – and told them to come to her basement on East 84th Street. The idea of a village stuck and became My Village Yoga. That was more than a decade ago. Archibald-Russell hasn’t stopped since.

Today My Village Yoga has trained a host of Black yoga teachers – “more Black teachers than any studio I know,” one former student said – leading to free community yoga happening across Cleveland neighborhoods.

That is not a small thing in a city where, not long ago, you could go years on a yoga mat and never see a Black face leading the room. 

‘Black people need this’

Archibald-Russell spent 25 years working in finance for Ohio’s largest newspaper. The job was steady. Good benefits. Long tenure. And stressful enough that she started to take a yoga class around the corner to survive her afternoons.

“It was too easy to leave work, go do this at lunchtime, and it made my afternoon with these folks so much better,” she says. “I mean, beyond the philosophy and all that — I just know how it made me feel.”

That feeling became a conviction. After earning her 200-hour certification, she had one thought she couldn’t shake: Black people need this. Not the version packaged for suburban studio spaces with pricey drop-ins. The real thing with the breath work, the philosophy, the self-regulation, the community. All of it. And somewhere Black people already were.

“My game plan was: I’m going to go where Black people are,” she says, “…where people are already coming and comfortable. I’m just gonna bring something that maybe you haven’t tried.”

And she didn’t charge for it.

Working in the community

From the basement, she moved to the Martin Luther King Jr. Branch of the Cleveland Public Library. Then Thurgood Marshall Recreation Center in Hough. Then Saturdays at the Cleveland Public Library’s Rice Branch, right in the heart of Buckeye-Larchmere at East 116th Street. Her best friend, Vonita Burke, who would eventually become her co-instructor and co-founder of their teacher training, was often the first person Archibald-Russell called. Sometimes only one person showed up for class. Sometimes no one did and it was just the two of them. 

They improvised the gear for years. Men’s ties stood in for yoga straps, folded mats for extra knee cushion. A small grant from a Ward 7 council member eventually upgraded things — real blocks, straps, blankets — and when My Village Yoga moved on from Thurgood, all of that equipment went to the Clean House, a sober living facility in Buckeye, so the classes could keep going there.

Daphne Settles had been practicing at the Clean House since meeting Burke at a Larchmere studio. They were regulars who recognized each other the way Black yogis learn to do in rooms that are mostly something else. When she found out what Archibald-Russell and Burke were doing in the community, she wanted in. She taught free yoga at the Clean House for two years, until she moved out of state.

“There was nothing like that in the Thurgood Marshall area or the Buckeye community area,” Settles says. “Yoga has been such a secret — for the elites, for so long. I’m grateful it was offered to people who could not [otherwise] afford to go.”

Settles had come to yoga in 2013, after her mother died. A grief counselor suggested it. She spent years at the JCC and other studios. She had never, not once, had a Black teacher — until My Village Yoga.

Sandra Bishop found My Village Yoga around 2017, searching for a free class in the community. She had been doing yoga for years already, learning from VHS tapes, following along on TV at home. She wasn’t a beginner. She just hadn’t had access to a real class in her neighborhood. Then she found Burke at Rice Branch library.

“It was predominantly Black people,” she says. “All shapes and sizes. And how many men would show up.” She laughs at the memory. “It wasn’t young, skinny people. It was people who were just looking for some kind of a healing journey in their life.”

That was the point. That had always been the point.

“The stress that we have in this United States of America,” Archibald-Russell says. “They need this self-regulation. They need these techniques. They need this movement. They need this coming together in community.” A beat. “And more than anything, to me, that’s the magic.”

No intention of stopping

Archibald-Russell is 60 now. She has no intention of stopping. She still teaches at Lexington-Bell Community Center in Hough two days a week — a space that has been with her long enough that she’s watched some of the children from her earliest classes grow into middle schoolers. She leads a Saturday morning community class at PNC Fairfax Connection on East 82nd Street. On Thursdays at 10:30 she leads arthritis yoga there — people in chairs, people on mats, whoever needs what they need. Yoga for everyone and every body isn’t just her tagline. It’s the way she runs a room.

The teacher training is in its fourth cohort. She and Burke launched it in 2018. My Village Yoga is now a registered Yoga Alliance school. 

The curriculum she and Burke built together opens with something most yoga teacher trainings skip entirely: the African and South American roots of the practice. The mainstream narrative positions yoga as South Asian in origin, later adopted by the West. The fuller picture is more complicated — and more relevant to a room full of Black students. When they first submitted the curriculum for Yoga Alliance registration, they believed it was rejected partly because of that section. They revised it, but kept the content. Got approved.

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She runs her teacher training out of her own studio space in the Larchmere neighborhood, where a partner provides the space at no charge, one more way the economics of accessibility get solved quietly, one relationship at a time.

Since 2020, the cohorts have been small — six to eight students, sometimes fewer. But across four cohorts and years of informal mentorship before that, Archibald-Russell has supported more than 30 Black yogis in Cleveland in becoming certified instructors.

They are scattered across the city now. Working in schools. Teaching at rec centers. Running their own practices. Showing up.

There will always be a free class

Bishop made herself a promise when she graduated: There will always be a free class.

“That free class, at times, saved me,” she says. “It was somewhere I could go and just release.” She teaches at 6 p.m. Monday nights at Earle B. Turner Recreation Center in the Union-Miles neighborhood. First Saturday of the month at Garfield Park. She teaches chair yoga at senior centers. She works with Zenworks in schools.

She describes teaching like conducting an orchestra — her job is to move people through the music, not play every instrument herself. “Once you relinquish control and just follow the instructions being given to you, it allows your mind to relax,” she says. “Even in spite of what may come across as difficult positioning.”

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Trinity Johnson, one of the earlier cohort graduates, came to yoga as a dancer, already moving in the language of the body before she had words for it. The training gave her structure and deepened a passion she didn’t expect: gut health, indigenous food ways, the research side of wellness, how integrative healing reaches communities stuck in medical systems. She completed a master’s in Health and Wellness Management. She launched Soul Honey Wellness — yoga, health coaching, workshops. She works as a Social Emotional Learning educator, building mindfulness curriculum for young people. “My Village Yoga didn’t just teach me how to instruct,” she says. “It gave me a pathway.”

That’s what a decade of free community practice sounds like as it ripples across the city and into neighborhoods – impacting teachers and students alike. Carrying forward something Archibald-Russell started in a basement and moved into public libraries because she believed Black people deserved access to their own healing.

In memory of

Vonita Burke taught for Cleveland Clinic. Chronic pain programs. Pulmonary wellness. Community classes in Euclid and at Fairfax Market. Yoga therapy, in rooms with doctors and nurses, doing work that brought out her own imposter syndrome — a little skinny Black girl from Alabama, in the inner city of Cleveland, doing this — and then put it back down again. 

“God didn’t put me here to fail,” she said recently. “I’m doing what I was put here to do. Because even with all of this, at least right now, I’m still teaching yoga, and I’m going to teach yoga until I can’t.”

During the reporting of this story, Vonita Burke passed away. Family, friends and fellow yogis will honor her at a memorial service back where it all began – the Rice branch of the Cleveland Public Library.