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In May, Shanthi Project celebrated our fourteenth anniversary, reflecting on many full, busy years since our founding in 2010 by Denise Veres. Our organization at its start was a relatively small operation, bringing yoga and mindfulness to only a handful of classrooms, the Northampton County Prison, and the Juvenile Justice Center.
One month later, in June, we tallied our impact from the 2023-24 school year and found that we had taught in 109 classrooms, accounting for thousands of students and teachers in thirteen different schools across four districts—not to mention our afterschool programs, summer camps, and adult outreach in workplaces and community organizations. Now, with more than a decade of meaningful, real-life impact behind us, we’re paying homage to our beginnings by launching the Veres Society: a membership program in support of our mission.
What Is the Veres Society?
We designed the Veres Society to play a vital role in transforming lives, by helping Shanthi Project sustain and grow our essential mindfulness programs. In harnessing the power of our passionate and dedicated donors, we aim to collectively support the mental health and well-being of children and adults throughout the Lehigh Valley. We champion this work because we see mindfulness as a superpower; decades of research show how it can reduce stress, improve focus, decrease emotional reactivity, and so much more. Strong, consistent programming on our part can arm community members with the mindfulness tools and resources that have been proven to bolster resilience, making tomorrow better than today, for children and adults alike.
You can learn about the details of The Veres Society here, including membership levels, benefits, and how to join us in helping to unlock the power of mindfulness.
This membership program is named in honor of Denise Veres, who founded Shanthi Project back in 2010. In recognition of our new initiative, aimed at commemorating her work and legacy, we are excited to highlight our founder and share the story of Shanthi Project’s beginnings.
Meet Denise Veres
Well before she started Shanthi Project, Denise Veres was dedicated to helping others. Pennsylvania-raised, she cultivated a career of over twenty years in clinical research, which steered her interests in the direction of quality-of-life research. Along the way, she also became interested in how diet, exercise, and stress management could affect health, finding promise in the idea that yoga, meditation, and mindfulness could help alleviate physical pain, illness and emotional distress.
In fact, Denise told us that she has maintained a yoga and meditation practice since she was only fifteen years old. When Jon Kabat-Zinn's Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program was developed in the late 1970s, this became “a guiding force” for her personal and professional interests. “The large body of peer-reviewed research demonstrating the benefits of mindfulness meditation for people coping with stress, anxiety, depression, chronic pain, and various physical conditions including heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, and cancer particularly resonated with me,” she said.
These interests coalesced at just the right time: when one of Denise’s yoga students, the Deputy Director at Northampton County Juvenile Justice Center, asked if she could teach a handful of yoga classes to incarcerated youth. At the beginning, Denise’s intention was to run the program for a single cohort, over the course of one month. But just a few months later, her ongoing research into yoga, trauma, and mindfulness led her to establish an entire nonprofit organization around yoga and mindfulness education.
When it came to the name, “The first unit of boys that I taught at Juvenile Treatment were curious about Sanskrit and liked shanthi, the Sanskrit word for peace,” Denise told us. “We offered each other shanthi at the end of classes. Thus, Shanthi Project was born.”
Shanthi Project Grows Its Roots
In the earliest days of Shanthi Project, Denise and several yoga and mindfulness instructors taught at the Juvenile Justice Center, Northampton County Jail, and the Boys & Girls Club of Easton. By the end of 2010, all Shanthi teachers were trained in trauma-informed practices, grounded in Denise’s early experiences with incarcerated youth. “They are hurting kids, fraught with anxiety and guilt, and suffering from the repercussions of trauma experienced in their lives,” she remembers. Quickly, the organization’s focus expanded from yoga and meditation, to include mindfulness in all its forms, including brain science, emotional regulation, and strategies to stay focused and calm, and respond, rather than react, to stressors.
Not long after, Shanthi Project entered the realm of after-school programs, which naturally led to teaching mindfulness in classrooms: now the organization’s main focus. As Denise puts it succinctly, Shanthi Project went “from the suggestion of a one-off, one month yoga program for twelve boys in the Juvenile Justice Center’s treatment unit, to teaching hundreds of classes to thousands of children and adults each year.”
From the beginning, a central focus of ours has been research. This was informed by Denise’s background in clinical research, as well as her desire to prove that our work is not only important, but evidence-based, too. Even in those first few classes at the Juvenile Justice Center, Denise collected outcome data to assess the impact of her yoga sessions. Then, in 2013, Shanthi Project encountered a gamechanger: a research collaboration with Dr. Mark Sciutto, Professor of Psychology at Muhlenberg College, who brought his research expertise in behavioral science to our organization. This long-standing partnership with Mark—and his many students through the years— has proven invaluable, resulting in thorough, well-designed research that has shown us how and where to place our focus on developing our programs. These research efforts have even led to the 2021 acceptance of our research in the peer-reviewed Journal of Child and Family Studies.
Realizing Our Founder’s Vision
Nearly fifteen years into this project, Shanthi Project has now developed tremendously. We have impacted the lives of tens of thousands of children and adults across the Lehigh Valley. We have a dedicated staff that grows each year to meet the needs of the ever-evolving organization. Now, our programming addresses social and emotional resiliency of all kinds and contexts—whether it be in a classroom, family and social life, or work.
We have continued this work not only because of the testimonials we’ve received from others (like the second-grade student who told Denise, “I used to punch a wall when I would lose and now I just take a breath”), but because we ourselves wholeheartedly believe in the power of mindfulness. The human brain is complex, able to drive strong emotions at the drop of a hat; but practicing mindfulness can help us keep these feelings in check and allow space for a thoughtful response, rather than a regrettable reaction. The skills we learn from mindfulness must be practiced to be strengthened, but, importantly, they cannot be unlearned or forgotten.
Though our organization has evolved greatly since its founding, one thing hasn’t changed: the nonprofit’s needs for funding. In reality, the requests for our school programming have always outweighed the funding we receive. To that end, we hope that you consider becoming a member of The Veres Society and joining us in realizing our founder’s vision, both now and in the future. Learn more about the membership levels and benefits here!
When you help us further our mission, you’re touching the lives of countless individuals and supporting your community in becoming kinder, more compassionate, and stronger overall. You’re contributing to a legacy that our humble beginnings could never have imagined.
Denise herself reflected on this impact: “I can’t tell you how grateful I am for moving forward on a suggestion to teach a class at juvenile treatment and seeing this amazing organization continually gaining momentum, stature and respect in the community that it serves, but most importantly, making a difference in so many lives.”
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