Greenpoint has no shortage of wellness, the boutique-studio, hundred-dollar-membership kind. One of the neighborhood’s busiest yoga operations is the opposite of that: a $10 class in a church basement, run by volunteers, that turns backbends into food for hungry neighbors.
Greenpoint Community Yoga charges $10 to register and sends 100 percent of the proceeds to North Brooklyn Angels, the local food charity. It was founded in February 2024 by Julia Elia, a yoga teacher and Angels volunteer, with Jenny Narod joining as co-lead later that year, and it has grown past 500 members and raised more than $10,000 in its first two years, twice-a-month classes in the space at the Church of the Ascension on Kent Street.
That money lands somewhere concrete. North Brooklyn Angels runs a mobile soup kitchen that, the charity says, hands out 2,000 free hot meals every week and has served more than 750,000 since 2017, an operation that scales with every $10 that comes through the basement door. In a neighborhood where the cost of living keeps climbing, the gym membership and the food line are closer together than anyone likes to admit, and this collective sits on the seam between them.
The founders frame it less as charity than as reciprocity. Narod talks about what everyone gets back by being a villager, the connection and belonging, and Elia about people coming together for the benefit of others. The pitch is simple and a little subversive: the self-care economy that gentrification built can, if you point it the right way, feed the people that same economy is squeezing out.
It is also a model other blocks could copy, which is the useful part. A teacher willing to donate time, a congregation with a basement, and a charity that needs steady money is not a hard formula to reproduce, and it converts an hour of exercise into meals without anyone having to write a grant.
If you want in, Greenpoint Community Yoga’s schedule and registration are on its site, and the $10 you pay for a class is the donation, no separate ask. And if a yoga class is not your thing, North Brooklyn Angels takes volunteers and money directly for the soup kitchen the classes feed.
Featured image: Greenpoint Community Yoga
