Meet Evan Scharfeld of Cultivate Yoga

Today we’d like to introduce you to Evan Scharfeld.

Hi Evan, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
In 2017, I recognized the need to bring quality yoga to a wider community in our area – hoping to make the practice more accessible to more individuals and to help remove barriers that may prevent the underserved from exploring the self-empowering tools that yoga provides. From this realization, our nonprofit organization, Cultivate Yoga, was born.

We set out on a mission to share the value that yoga had brought to our lives and to provide a yoga practice to anyone and any community organization who desired it but who may not have easy access. From our perspective, a yoga practice had become inaccessible to so many partially due to the rising costs of attending classes at the existing studios. We decided then that yoga provided by Cultivate should be free for anyone who needs it to be.

Over the years we have partnered with many special organizations that are each, doing their own work to serve the community and who recognize that a yoga practice can be a powerful complement to the services they offer to their people. Ultimately, we partner up to discover opportunities that allow us to align missions, empower individuals and build stronger communities through yoga.

In 2020 the opportunity arose to create a yoga home for Cultivate in Avon, OH. We call it Cultivate Yoga Space and it is here that our mission manifests in reality each and every day! At Cultivate Yoga Space, we offer gift-based yoga to the entire region and focus on building community one individual at a time. This means that everything we offer is free for anyone who needs it to be. As an organization, we offer yoga as gift to the community and what we ask for in return is that individuals accept this gift in the spirit of responsibility and reciprocity. A pay-it-forward model. By receiving the gift of yoga from Cultivate, we ask that our students find some way to give back to the community in any way they see fit – this could be a monetary donation back to Cultivate or choosing to serve the wider community by volunteering time & energy with another organization. It is completely up to the student how they choose to reciprocate the gift of yoga that they have received.

Under this unique model, our trajectory is moving us towards a special place of being fully self-sustaining and community-supported – purely from those within our practicing community!

We continue to assess and evolve our offerings and our model as we see fit to ensure that we will exist as a valuable entity far into the future for anyone who needs access to a quality yoga practice and a loving community!

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I certainly would not classify our road as “smooth” but I will say that the struggles that we’ve endured have been a true gift! We would not be in the position to cultivate this idea and build community in this unique way without the challenges that the world presented us with.

In March of 2020, we opened Cultivate Yoga Space. Just 2 weeks later we, like so many other businesses in our state, were shut down by the governor of Ohio for COVID concerns/regulations. We without a yoga home to generate any revenue yet still had all the expenses of this yoga home to maintain.

We decided to go virtual quickly, but it was clear that virtual yoga was not going to be a revenue replacement for a fully functioning studio. We decided instead, to use the opportunity to align with our nonprofit mission and share the practice for FREE to those special people in our community who were still out there serving us every day. We began to offer FREE memberships Healthcare Workers, First Responders, and Essential Service Workers. In this way, we were still able to serve the community in a very special way and reciprocate the gifts that these amazing individuals we selflessly giving to our entire community.

When we opened our doors back up in July 2020, we still were not able to generate much revenue – we had the safety of our students in mind, were regulated by limited capacity and there was much apprehension by individuals within the community of coming indoors to practice yoga within this novel pandemic situation.

We continued on like this for some time until we decided in January of 2021 to fully shift our business model to this gift-based idea. I can honestly say that without COVID, I’m not sure we would’ve gotten here and this way that we are sharing now is what feels right, unique and magical about Cultivate as an organization.

Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about Cultivate Yoga?
Cultivate Yoga is nonprofit, gift-based, community-supported yoga organization. We serve by sharing yoga offerings for free to anyone who needs them to be through community partnerships and at our yoga home, Cultivate Yoga Space in Avon, OH. We believe that a quality yoga practice should be open to anyone and we aim to increase access to the tools that yoga provides to a more diverse population across our community.

Every offering (classes, workshops, etc.) at our studio, Cultivate Yoga Space, can be attended for free by anyone. What we ask in return is that individuals recognize the responsibility of receiving this gift of yoga and reciprocate by giving back to Cultivate and/or the wider community in any way they choose and believe to be valuable. Monetary donations back to the Cultivate organization are accepted, deeply appreciated and necessary to sustain this mission and our operations – but they are certainly not the only way to pay-it-forward. This is our karmic yoga – we choose to share yoga as a gift in order to empower individuals, build resilience and strengthen community!

Our community partnerships are our opportunity to shine and share our work with the underserved individuals in our community. We share the practice with communities and populations that may not easily have access to yoga in order to expose people to the powerful tools that yoga provides to help guide a healthy lifestyle for ALL. We partner with schools, community centers, municipal facilities, rehabilitation /recovery facilities and more – anywhere an organization recognizes the benefit of bringing a consistent yoga practice to the people within their community.

I am beyond proud of the fact that we took a big risk in deciding to operate a yoga studio in a way that felt right to our hearts and helped us live our mission – and it’s working! Our business model is like no other in the region. It is rooted in the most basic level of human kindness, sharing and community and we are working our way, more and more with each passing month, towards full sustainability as a gift-based yoga organization!

Who else deserves credit in your story?
The root of our mission is that we are building a sustainable yoga community and that each and everyone within it is just as significant as the other. Every single person who chooses to practice with us, everyone who shares our story, everyone who receives the gift we offer and pays it forward plays a major role in building and sustaining this community for ALL.

Being a nonprofit, we do have a board that works to make major decisions together for the continuous improvement and ultimate success of the organization. Over time the board has shifted and changed but the individuals that have served have been instrumental to our current trajectory and we may not be where we are without any one of them having served in their own unique way. These special individuals are: Colleen Alber, Rob Hawkins, Gigi Evans, Deirdre Wenzel, and Bridget Murtha.

On the studio front, we purchased an existing yoga studio, 3 Sisters Yoga and transitioned that business to become Cultivate Yoga Space, our nonprofit yoga home. The owners of 3 Sisters Yoga have been so supportive throughout the transition of the studio and beyond. These special individuals are: John Plagens, Lauren Plagens, Courtney Plagens, Halle Plagens and Beth Henry.

There are countless others out there in the Cleveland yoga community that have been so supportive of this mission and have helped in so many various ways that I would need an entire essay to recall them all. What I will say here is that I am humbled and honored by this special yoga community and the underlying spirit of collaboration over competition.

Infinite gratitude to anyone and everyone out there who has been there to support this Cultivate dream!

Contact Info:

• Email: connect@cultivateyoga.org
• Website: https://www.cultivateyoga.org/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cultivateyogacle/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cultivateyogacommunity
• Other: https://www.cultivateyogaspace.com/