newjersey

Konscious
Youth Development &amp; Service, a nonprofit in Asbury Park, utilizes holistic
practices to help students and educators cope with trauma and their emotions.

The
cofounders Mychal Mills
and Rodney Salomon
say word of mouth helped the program to expand. They spoke to News 12 about the
program.

<b>LEARN MORE:</b>&nbsp;<a href="https://www.konscious.org/">Konscious Youth Development &amp; Service</a>

Konscious Youth Development & Service, a nonprofit in Asbury Park, utilizes holistic practices to help students and educators cope with trauma and their emotions.

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And of course, the clear weather help with that launch, but you're not going to find that yet. Tomorrow, the skies will clear after some early showers in the morning and maybe even some wet snow. So right now, this is it, we're in the thick of it. It's going to be picking up the rain that is from this point on again. And after eight o'clock, some of those steadier downpours will be right back. So visibility is really poor out there. Roads will be wet. Flooding is a good possibility right now as this rain picks right back up again. So more flooding into tomorrow morning and the strongest winds are going to be around this evening. So that's where we could have some power outages and even some, some minor damage out there. So for tonight, temperatures are going to start to cool, but we're holding in the forties into tomorrow 40 days. That's it. And those winds will make it feel much, much cooler, will definitely feel the chill waking up by Tuesday morning. But here's a look at the extended forecast. Temperatures are back to normal. It's a dry week until next weekend and that's a look at your forecast storm watch brought to you by PSE.

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Spotlight New Jersey: Konscious Youth Development & Service

when we see violence not just around our community but across the world, it affects everybody, right? So we have to find healthy ways to hear. And coming up at nine, these two men run a nonprofit in Asbury Park geared to help their community recover a nonprofit in Asbury Park is geared to transform youth schools and communities through holistic practices. The group was at the sea here now Festival in Asbury Park, former news 12 employee Megan Stephanie texted me this photo, Rodney Solomon and Michael Mills are the co founders of conscious youth development and service. Rodney explains why they launched K Y D. S. When we first began our journey, we didn't have a lot of funding. We didn't have a whole plan, but we knew that we wanted to create a safe environment where people could express themselves authentically and be vulnerable in a container where they're not gonna be judged. So since our inception in 2014, we started on one mic, one soul, which is a community meditation community, open mic night event where it's not just poetry, it's a space where you can be vulnerable because as you develop higher self awareness, if you don't have a space to express what you're going through, it's kind of just goes back inside. So having an environment where we're singing, we're dancing, we're talking expressing stories that express our pain when someone shares their story. It didn't only just heal them. It was healing everybody else inside the space and that's been happening since 2014 every single month since our inception. And from there, we recognize man wellness in urban communities. It's very challenging to access. You know, we believe that inner peace shouldn't have a cost, you know, So we started creating these monthly meditation sits at a local community organization called cooler cafe where we believe inner peace shouldn't have a cause. So we were doing breathing exercises, mindfulness training to help them develop the ability to observe their mind objectively. So you don't have to attach to every single thought. And there's a lot of research to Jon Kabat Zinn's mindfulness based that production that shows the benefits that it has on the physical mental level. And from there we provided a free summer program in the community where since 2015 we have service elementary middle in a summer program and we also have high schoolers as interns where we go over SCL social most learning mindfulness movement, healthy diet and nutrition, restorative practices, connection arts and craft to help build these kids to train them to develop resilience from the inside out. And we started to see the impact we were having within the work. We were doing the community and this is just a passion project. We were still working a full time job. I was working at the school based program funded by the department Children and families, Michael was working at the food bank as a food resource manager and it was just passion. We come off of work, take a vehicle pick up kids and grow to our programming and eventually mike took a leap of love in 2017, I took a leap of love as well and this helped us evolve our programming to focus bringing what we're doing in the community into the school system. At noon today, K Y. D. S talks about the importance of building healthy relationships. A nonprofit in Asbury park aims to transform youth schools and communities through holistic practices, conscious youth development and service focuses on social emotional learning, mindfulness, restorative justice and equity. Rodney Salomon and Michael Mills founded it. Their vision is to create a community wellness center that expands on skills taught on campuses as in now that we have a center where teachers from all of Monmouth County, all of New Jersey could come and receive training around mindfulness self awareness, self regulation, using your breath as a therapeutic tool, understanding restorative practices, how sound can be utilized as a way to help Children remain regulated and calm. And also having a space where people in the community can also come in and develop the skills to train the ability to be in a state of coherence. It offers mic night and monthly me meditation called relax and release hear more from those co founders tomorrow morning at six on News 12 3 of my spotlight on an Asbury nonprofit dedicated to healing trauma in the community Is coming up next conscious youth development and services a nonprofit in Asbury Park. It utilizes holistic practices to help students and educators cope with trauma and their emotions. The group has worked with 100 schools to spread the word. We had a full time school based program in Asbury park School District from 2017 to 2019 where we had a mindful moment room in every single school. That's a safe space where kids could come and check in for 15 to 20 minutes. They could check in with a self regulated staff. They have the ability to express what's on their mind, what they're dealing with. They had the option to do a practice to help them develop their skills of resilience and then they would leave it for reflection and focusing on a solution of what they can begin to due to empower themselves. And in our three years there we had over 8000 visits. Now these are duplicated some 1000 visits, a district of 1200 students but from the elementary to the middle school some kids would have over 200 visits in the school year coming into that space because they knew it was a space that can feel safe but also as a space that they can work on their personal transformation because we can't solve all the issues that I used to buy kids food. I used to give kids clothes every single but I came to I didn't have the funding to do this on a regular basis. That's my next question, where do you all get the funding to support K Y D. S magic sauce. Right. It's like when you carry this type of intention, when you carry this type of frequency and energy within our hearts, you find magic funding will come to us. Right? And I know right? It's a very simple, whatever your biggest currency there is. But you know, people saw the authenticity that were rarely bringing to the community. Right? And we, we do have like a source of funding from school based contracts and partnerships. Right? But we do have like we call them little angels who come into our lives and provided us different funding sources, fundraisers, individual contributions, right? We had some small grants early on from local nonprofits supporting us, you know, but we found a way because it was less about the funding and more about the impact. Right? And we, we knew that when we focus on the impact, the funding will come right. The individuals really start to see that. And even this year on the state level N J E A D C F. Right? Department of Health, they see the magic and they want to support us because they know by supporting us, we're supporting the transformation in our community and coming up at nine how K Y. D. S is expanding post the pandemic conscious youth development and services, a nonprofit in Asbury Park. It utilizes holistic practices to help students and educators cope with trauma and their emotions. The co founders say word of mouth helped the program to expand after the pandemic. It was almost a realization of I need this in my building, right? Educators admin students stress at an all time high. Right? So there's actual need that came and said they saw a conscious youth development services like how do we get them in our building? Right. And as we connect with individuals in different school settings, we really make it a point to work with their staff, right? Because it's easy to come and work with the youth. All right. But we don't want to do it for you. We want to do it with you. So even beyond our presence inside the building. It lives in the culture, it lives in every individual that the youth scene. So we work with staff, right? And really try to get on their P. D. Times as limited as that there is. But we know as many touch points it's gonna create a transformation, right? And we will do either large or small group workshops with the youth, right? Maybe on a regular basis. 6 to 8 week program as a constant classroom program or an assembly setting, right? But we know every touch point from you coming inside and connecting to our hearts. It's gonna transform, transform you in a little bit more. Right, what kind of a vision do you have? Go ahead? You have a thought? I was gonna say like we have this model, what we call a culture of wellness where our first step is to make the school trauma informed because having the education of the average child experiences are the impact it has on early childhood development. But also if staff are aware of the protective factors by just by having a healthy relationship with the child and them liking your presence, right? It could be the difference that supports them in thriving without even have to be a therapist or a counselor. So knowing what trauma is, but being healing informed about what tools support and strengthen the individual. That makes it realistic for me to do. And then we talk about recharging the school population where we want to make sure that every staff, the students and even the parents, we work on the whole school ecosystem, receive the same tools around self awareness and self regulation. So that way we have at a basic foundation the ability to self regulate when that storm does come and I can anchor and ground myself and then to really support the punitive ization of school systems. We focus on restorative justice as a framework to handle conflict in real time, but really making it become proactive and like Michael's saying, we offer programs for staff, we offer the same programs in a gentle way for students and we also introduced that for the parents Salomon and mills credit their staff with helping to implement their programs in schools in the community. Rodney is pictured with his wife, Krista, and their adorable son. Krista is the marketing alchemy lead for k Y D s. We have some of the most amazing staff since our inception from our very first hire, Miss Erica, who's here on set with us as well. And they are the Foundation. You know, like you may see the greatness coming from myself and Michael, we may get a lot of the shine and being in these different opportunities to speak, but honestly we will be nothing about the team that helps bring this energy to life and they are a marvelous team. Rodney also took us through a breathing exercise. You can see it and take part on my facebook page.

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