MYC Community Fundraiser

Hi friends! Amy & Laura here! We're the co-founders of Mantra Yoga Collective and we're inviting YOU to help cultivate a space for yoga, gathering and community service in Northwest Austin, called "The Retreat".

All proceeds from our Community Fundraiser go towards purchasing mats, towels, straps, bolsters, and weights for students to use at The Retreat. This is right in line with one of our major pillars as a community: making yoga practice ACCESSIBLE--physically by providing mats and props, teaching our classes with variations and options for all of our students, and financially through our sliding scale pricing model. By offering yoga mats and towels at our studio for all students, the ONLY thing you'll need to practice yoga at The Retreat is your body!

OUR BACKSTORY

The Retreat will be the 3rd incarnation of our almost 8 year-old women-owned business which began in 2015 as Studio Mantra - a sweet community studio in the heart of Northwest Austin. In March 2020 as a result of the pandemic, we pivoted and became a 100% virtual yoga business as we transformed to Mantra Yoga Collective. We became a tech company on the fly as we immediately figured out how to keep all 20+ of our teachers employed by offering their classes (and ours) in Zoom. Our teachers and students quickly adapted to this new virtual way of life, and we still host about 20 weekly classes in Zoom to this day. Although livestream classes were (and still are) appreciated and loved by many students, we soon realized they’re not for everyone. We soon began offering in-person classes in a very limited capacity at a local community club in Northwest Austin, called Westover Hills Club. We're very grateful for our partnership with Westover Hills Club, but we're now super stoked to move into our new studio home, called The Retreat, located at 3300 West Anderson Lane in Northwest Austin. The buildout will begin any day now!

We've learned over the past 3+ years that our business and our community are RESILIENT. We’ve kept our heads above water long enough to see the other side of the pandemic, and the view is BEAUTIFUL. We feel the time is right to get back together again in our own space, to see each other’s faces and to be recharged by each other’s energy.

OUR VISION

We envision “The Retreat” as a brick-and-mortar studio space and yoga-centric business that is community driven, community supported and (partly) community funded! We'll deliver a wide range of yoga & movement classes, events and service projects, as well as offering a truly communal shared social space for gathering. About half the space will be dedicated to TWO practice rooms. The larger one will accommodate up to 20-30 students and will be equipped with infrared heating panels and livestream technology to serve the students who still prefer to practice at home. The other half of our space will feature an open floor plan for socializing, working remotely, or simply relaxing. Picture a “modern tropical” vibe with comfy seating areas, beautiful textiles, and plants – lots of plants! We're partnering with our friends at K-Tonic Kombucha and Flora Coffee to offer a full-service coffee/kombucha bar to serve the public. We'll also host a retail area with a highly curated collection of clothing, gifts and locally-made jewelry. We also plan to feature local artists and artisans! More than anything else, the community gathering area will be dedicated to holding space for our COMMUNITY to be just that again, and whatever else that may entail from day to day.

A major focus of our business involves community outreach in the local schools in our area. For the 2024/2025 school year, we plan to roll out programs to bring FREE after-school yoga & meditation classes to our local TEACHERS. Many schools offer after-school yoga for children...but we'd like to support our teachers and staff! Our vision involves working with local businesses in an "Adopt-A-School" format in which the business would donate the cost to pay a yoga teacher to travel to a school on a monthly or weekly basis to offer classes that are free to teachers and staff. We also plan to offer discounted memberships to teachers at The Retreat! And we'd also love to work with school teachers on how to bring yoga & meditation into the classroom.

We're excited to do GOOD THINGS in our community and we'd love YOU to join us!