When you nourish yourself, you nourish another.
Your retreat fee includes a generous donation to our foundation.
Together with Balinese teacher Sumayana (Suma), Julia Ingersoll Retreats founded the Young Cultural Leaders with Spiritual Insight, a non-profit foundation for youth education in Bali.
From the beginning, we built a give-back component into our retreats to support promising Balinese youth from poor families to attend junior high, high school and university—if she chooses—on full scholarship; in addition, they participate in our core intensive program: Young Cultural Leaders with Spiritual Insight.
This unique and fundamental program supports the whole person to thrive, through yoga, community service, gainful work, ceremony, and practical training in how to manage life.
Our motto?
Aim for the highest!
Why Bali?
Bali's unique, powerful, and sacred culture is a gift to the world as a whole, and it is in peril of losing its integrity. The Balinese culture carries the sacred dimension into everyday life; it upholds a different paradigm of living that values cooperation over competition, and harmony above all.
Education has the power to save this precious culture—and the program we fund is dedicated to educating young leaders devoted to cultural preservation and the restoration of nature; to carry on the magnificent artistic and spiritual heritage that is the essence of Bali.
Our Mission and Intention
Our mission and intention is to nurture leadership grounded in spiritual insight: to follow one’s path with heart, directed by right action. The original group of students has already become the teachers for the incoming classes, sharing the knowledge and discipline they've learned with their communities.
In addition to funding all regular schooling costs for the group all the way through university level; our program's key feature is an intensive, ongoing, weekly course covering a wide-range of subjects to foster a holistic, skillful life—including yoga, meditation, philosophy, mantra, English, computer skills, practical how-to-live skills, employment, and other essential topics for health and wellbeing.
How it started
In 2013 we joined forces with a brilliant, young Balinese teacher named Sumayana (Suma) to found the nonprofit with a group of 11 teenage girls—and the program is still thriving.
In 2019 four of the original young women graduated high school with top honors and are now attending universities across Bali.The others are still studying, working and practicing together with the group, and we have also added a new members over the years, including several boys.
In addition to excelling in school and yogic studies, the students focus on community service through teaching and giving. The foundation regularly distributes large quantities of rice to the very poorest and elderly residents.
During the volcano-warning evacuations, the students assisted the refugee camps, providing rice to the needy, and also offering yoga classes to up to 80 kids per session!
Impact
Keeping it small so that we can be thorough and effective, the foundation has provided full financial support to 11 Balinese teenage students with full scholarships, starting from middle school through university.
We are excited to announce that in May 2018, the first two boys joined the program! The program is rigorous and requires full-hearted participation. The local fame of the program is spreading and the skill of our teacher in working with "difficult" youth is up to the task.
The results of the program have been wonderful: All of the students have dramatically raised their grades, and many have risen to number 1 ranking in their schools. Two have already continued on to university.
All of the students are devoted to the program, and grateful for all of the benefits they describe in their personal lives as well as academically. Most of the students now have part-time work-study jobs, and the most accomplished are now teaching the class of younger kids, our “second generation.”
Your retreat participation and donations make a difference.
Julia and Suma, friends and colleagues for life.
Thank you to our generous retreat participants for supporting this dream, and thanks to the extraordinary devotion, skill, creativity and hard work of our foundation's creator, leader and head-teacher in Bali, I Ketut Sumayana, who makes it happen.
Our dream is to extend and connect our work with youth-in-need in each of our regular retreat locations, and host young participants on retreat to foster cultural exchange.
Your support (of any amount) goes a long ways towards these goals and is accepted with gratitude!