About Mindfulness

What is Mindfulness

Mindfulness is a basic human capacity that everyone can cultivate to support health, humanity, and performance. Mindfulness supports health and well-being for all. The Crim has committed to co-creating a healthy, vibrant, and thriving community by sharing the science and practice of mindful awareness, courageous connection, and compassionate leadership

Offerings Include

Community-Wide Cross-Sector Engagement

  • Mindful organizational culture and climate consulting and training available for the health, education, business, and community sector (civic, faith, and non-profit organizations).

Mindful Community Leadership Development

  • Community Ambassadors for Youth program engages and supports more than 100 volunteers who serve Flint youth. Ambassadors are engaged as key participants in the design and delivery of programming and connected with training, resources, and a learning community.
  • Mindful Crim Fellowship program engages and supports 18 community leaders in an intensive 3-year learning journey to apply for certification to teach the Search Inside Yourself Leadership training program in partnership with the Crim Fitness Foundation

Community Workshops, Trainings, Programs, and Courses

  • Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and Resiliency workshops
  • Mindfulness, Emotional Intelligence, and Compassionate Leadership trainings including:
    • Search Inside Yourself Leadership Training
    • Locally designed workshops including:
      • Mindful Me - Developing a Personal Practice
      • Playing Attention - Tips for Adults to Engage Youth in Mindfulness
    • Yoga Ed. Professional Institute
    • Community Mindfulness and Yoga Classes (Online and In-Person)
    • Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction
    • Annual gathering with past speakers including Deepak Chopra, Jon Kabat-Zinn, George Mumford, and the Holistic Life Foundation.

Community Mindfulness and Yoga classes hosted weekly at multiple sites

All offerings are designed to be inclusive and support choice, agency, and empowerment; inviting diverse individuals, groups, and organizations to navigate personal and collective stressors in increasingly healthy, connected, and compassionate ways.

What is the Healthy, Mindful Flint Initiative?


The Crim Fitness Foundation convenes our community’s Mindfulness Initiative, known as Healthy, Mindful Flint. Programming launched in 2012 as a small pilot project. Today, a small, skilled mindfulness team convenes more than 30 local and national collaborators to support 10,000 Flint and Genesee County youth and adults annually to thrive: building the skills of mindful awareness, courageous connection, and compassionate leadership.

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The Need for the Mindful Flint Initiative

COVID-19 engaged us all in a collective public health pandemic that sparked great interest, empathy, and the need for innovative solutions to come together and build a more mindful, compassionate web of support for individual and community health. The longstanding pandemic of systemic racism underlies the inequities highlighted by COVID-19.

Mindfulness, emotional intelligence, and compassionate leadership are clearly not the only interventions needed to address these enormous challenges. However, research confirms that they can have a significant impact providing a healthy “buffering” effort to high levels of toxic stress resulting from these collective stressors. They also contribute to more compassion-informed policy changes contributing to systemic changes to support healthier, more equitable, and thriving communities.

Increasing access to evidence-based interventions that directly target the reduction of, and resilience to toxic stress are clearly needed. The Mindful Flint Initiative is not a panacea or a stand-alone effort. Rather, it serves as a key thread weaving together many public health and community development initiatives.

Impact

Since it began in 2011, the Crim Mindfulness Initiative has engaged more than 18,297 community members through training, events, and programming. In 2021 alone, over 10,000 youth and adults participated in mindfulness programming.

Drs. Karin Pfeiffer and Julia Felton of Michigan State University (MSU), Dr. Lenwood Hayman of University of Michigan, and Dr. B Grace Bullock of Oregon Research Institute all contribute to the evaluation and research of the initiative.

Program research and evaluation is currently most heavily focused on school programming efforts. A pilot study conducted in 2015 by Dr. Karin Pfeiffer of MSU found that mindfulness programming positively impacted the cognitive, emotional, and social health of youth in Flint schools.

  • 73% of students felt mindfulness helped them focus and make better decisions
  • 61% of students shared that mindfulness helped them avoid fights

Teacher reports of student behavior obtained during formative evaluation of Crim Mindfulness programming suggests that students in Flint may be benefiting from mindful practices in the classroom. Specifically students were observed to be more self-aware, better at regulating their emotions and behavior, and engaged in more prosocial and helping behaviors.

In December 2017, the team conducted a survey of all educators served by the initiative.

  • 96.6% of the 112 educators who responded reported that mindfulness is a valuable practice for their students
  • 87% practice mindfulness in the classroom with their students

Current Supporters

Our work would not be made possible without the generous support of the many individual donors (like you!) and the many foundations, organizations, interns, volunteers and mindful leaders in our local, state and national community.

Your support makes it possible for the Crim Mindfulness Initiative to serve 6,000+ youth and 1000+ educators in 5 districts, and host community mindfulness classes for 1,000+ members of the Flint and Genesee community each year.

Foundations

Organizations