On a Friday morning in a St. Petersburg elementary school gym, a room of ten-year-olds sits cross-legged on mats, eyes closed, learning to notice their own breathing. A few miles away, at a community center, a very different group—grandparents and retirees—settles into a free yoga class. Both rooms are part of the same story: an organization that started as a single yoga teacher’s idea for helping struggling students and grew, one Pinellas County school year at a time, into a countywide wellness network. It’s a story that Pinellas Community Foundation has helped write since 2019.
Mindful Movement Florida is the program; SpeakEasy M.E.D.I.A. Foundation is the organization that has served as its fiscal sponsor throughout — and, in that capacity, as Pinellas Community Foundation’s grantee of record for every one of these grants, from the earliest days operating under the name Urban Yoga Florida through today. No matter the program’s name at the time, the mission has stayed constant: teach children, youth, adults, and seniors across Pinellas County how to manage stress, regulate their emotions, and build healthier lives through yoga, mindfulness, and breathwork. The founding belief behind this effort? Once someone becomes mindful, they stop doing the things that are harmful to themselves, their families, and their community. Their team likes to put it more simply:
Your health is your wealth.
A First Grant, and a First Bet
When Pinellas Community Foundation started funding this work in 2019, the organization was still finding its footing under the name Urban Yoga Florida, led by founder Ghylian Bell. The need it was built to address was specific and well documented: Pinellas County, despite ranking in the top third of Florida counties for quality of life, was seeing residents die younger and more often from preventable chronic disease than their neighbors in Hillsborough, Sarasota, and Orange counties. Nowhere was that gap sharper than in the county’s Black communities, where the organization was concentrating its earliest work — inside Pinellas County schools, where young Black male students in particular faced higher suspension and dropout rates that fed directly into cycles of poverty and instability down the line.
That first grant ($6,000 through PCF’s Venture Philanthropy Fund) didn’t fund a big expansion, It funded something more foundational: intensive training for the organization’s five instructors, with a stated plan to also build out a marketing strategy so the young program could eventually stand on its own two feet. It was PCF betting on infrastructure before scale—a bet that would pay off for years to come.
Finding Its Name, Finding Its Footing
By 2020, the program had taken on the name it carries today: Mindful Movement Florida. A $10,000 general operating grant from PCF to SpeakEasy M.E.D.I.A. Foundation that year was earmarked to expand the program into four additional St. Petersburg schools, at a moment when the world—and every nonprofit in it—was being upended by COVID-19.
It was also the year the organization’s method really crystallized. Eight girls at a St. Petersburg middle school had been referred to Mindful Movement for fighting, truancy, and failing grades, each one aware she’d been sent as a kind of correction, and defensive because of it. The instructors didn’t start with yoga poses; they started by simply listening, session after session, until trust took hold. Weeks in, three of the girls discovered they were each managing the same medical condition, a coincidence that cracked something open. By the end of sixteen weeks, those same students were doing partner yoga together, and their grades and attendance had improved enough that teachers took notice. It’s the kind of outcome that doesn’t show up cleanly in a spreadsheet, but is exactly what PCF’s dollars are distributed to support: young people in Pinellas County given tools nobody had offered them before.
By this point, the organization was reaching roughly 600 unique people a year across schools, after-school enrichment sites, and free community classes held throughout south St. Petersburg—at the Enoch Davis Center, the Willis S. Johns Center, and the Imagine Museum, among others.
Along the way, one grant in this history came through a different channel worth noting: in 2022, a grant supported through federal recovery funds helped the program purchase equipment and technology needed to return to its Pinellas County school sites in person—a practical, unglamorous bridge that mattered enormously in the moment, even if it represents just one chapter in a much longer relationship.
Staying in the Room When Funding Fell Away
Growth rarely moves in a straight line, and Mindful Movement Florida’s relationship with Pinellas County’s schools tested that reality directly. When Title I budget cuts hit the Pinellas County school system, five elementary schools lost the funding that had been keeping Mindful Movement programming in their classrooms.
A $20,000 grant from PCF’s Social Opportunity Works Fund in 2023 didn’t just backfill that gap; it kept a seven-year school partnership intact at a moment when it could easily have quietly ended. The funding restored programming at five schools for the full year and supported two rounds of instructor training that grew the team from a handful of teachers to nine, with six new recruits in the pipeline. Alongside it, the organization put real effort into its own health, engaging in board development and building a six-member board drawn from education, finance, and faith backgrounds, all rooted in the south St. Petersburg community it serves.
A separate, larger commitment followed that same year: a $30,000 general operating grant paid over two years that pushed the program further outward with three new after-school intervention sites, expanded office space at the Sanderlin Center, and continued instructor training. By year’s end, the program had a presence at ten Pinellas County schools, ten after-school enrichment programs, and five weekly free community classes; infrastructure that, four years earlier, had existed as a plan on paper.
Evaluation work bore out what the classroom stories suggested: after six months, 80% of youth participants demonstrated increased emotional intelligence, and 60% reported a stronger ability to self-regulate.
What the Numbers Look Like Now
By 2025, the scale of the work had shifted meaningfully. Mindful Movement Florida was operating in twelve Pinellas County schools and five after-school enrichment programs, running two youth initiatives in partnership with the City of St. Petersburg, and hosting five free community classes a week open to all ages. The organization now serves nearly seven times the reach reported back in their first operating grant.
The most recent commitment, another $30,000 general operating grant structured as an installment award through 2027, marked a quiet but important shift in stated purpose: for the first time, the grant was directed toward compensating yoga instructors rather than relying on the volunteer model that had carried the work for its first several years. A program can only run on goodwill for so long before it needs to pay the people doing it.
The 2025 programming also expanded who the organization serves. New trauma-informed workshops and culturally responsive curriculum—modules on African American history, self-expression, and knowing one’s rights—deepened the work with students, while new free chair yoga classes at the St. Pete Sunshine Center and the Legacy at Jourdan Park brought the program’s reach to Pinellas County seniors for the first time.
A Model Built on Who’s in the Room
Part of what has made this partnership durable is that Mindful Movement Florida has been very deliberate about representation. The program is BIPOC-led and BIPOC-staffed at every level—leadership, instructors, and board—a choice founder Clayton Sizemore made from the outset. In communities where trust in outside institutions can be hard-won, instructors and leaders who share students’ backgrounds have made the difference between programming that gets tolerated and programming that actually takes hold. The organization has been candid about where gaps remain, too, finding certified male instructors from the BIPOC community is an ongoing challenge, one that matters specifically for the young Black male students who benefit most from seeing themselves reflected in their teachers.
Looking Ahead
The plans SpeakEasy M.E.D.I.A. Foundation and Mindful Movement Florida have laid out stay close to the same throughline that’s run through every grant since 2019: go deeper into the same Pinellas County neighborhoods, rather than spreading thin. The organization is targeting two to four additional schools in the coming years, continuing to build out chair yoga programming for seniors, and working to strengthen its board’s fundraising capacity. There’s also a standing hope that Title I funding will eventually be restored to the schools that lost it, alongside a push to diversify revenue through corporate partnerships and a small fee-for-service model.
What connects 2019 to 2025 isn’t any single grant, it’s a pattern. Across six grants and seven years, Pinellas Community Foundation has committed $107,680 to this work: funding an idea before it had proof, staying present through a pandemic, stepping in when a funding cut threatened to unravel a seven-year school partnership, and eventually helping the program take the step from an all-volunteer model to one that can actually pay the people doing the work. The mission’s own language, “your health is your wealth”, could just as easily describe the funding relationship itself: something built slowly, sustained deliberately, and worth far more than any single year’s grant total.
Feeling Inspired?
Inspired by what is possible in Pinellas County? Learn how to establish a fund at Pinellas Community Foundation and put your giving to work: pinellascf.org.
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