Team Peace grew out of the work of Kara Schmidt, a yoga, movement and mindfulness teacher of over 20 years. 

Kara began teaching yoga classes to adults in 2000.  But in 2007, Kara took a kids yoga teacher training with Radiant Child Yoga.  and began offering some classes to children at Spacious Heart Yoga, her yoga studio in Goshen, Indiana. 

In 2009, Kara collaborated with a local Mennonite pastor, Steve Thomas, who was a black belt in taekwondo.  They started a summer camp called Peace Camp which combined Kara’s expertise in yoga and mindfulness and Steve’s nonprofit called Peacemakers Inc.  Through his nonprofit, Steve had created and offered a program for youth called “Empower”. The program was designed specifically to address bullying and give kids tools to address bullying in their lives, whether they were the victim, the perpetrator or a bystander. Steve’s program combined taekwondo and conflict resolution tools. Steve and Kara worked together for 3 years in their collaboration and served over 100 children.  The program ended because Kara moved to Chicago in  2011.

Kara moved back to her hometown of Paoli, Indiana in 2015.  In 2018, a group of people from Orange County began to gather regularly to discuss what it might look like for our county to focus on becoming more trauma-informed, across all sectors.  These gatherings included law enforcement, educators, health care workers, mental health workers, faith leaders and other community organizations.  Eventually this group of people became a coalition that is now known as Thrive Orange County.

It was through these meetings that Kara became acquainted with educators and was eventually invited to come to offer a yoga and mindfulness class to Laura Line’s first grade class in the spring of 2019.  After a 6 week pilot program, Throop Elementary invited Kara to return the next year to offer these tools to 6 classrooms (about 125 students), mostly first graders.  The teachers and administrators began to notice shifts in the children’s ability to recognize and talk about emotions and in their ability to self-regulate. All the teachers noticed a positive impact in classroom behavior and in the student’s ability to come back to focus after big emotions. The teacher’s reported that the tools that the kids were using were actually allowing for more time to be spent on academics.

Because of these results, more teachers wanted to come on board to include the program into their own classrooms.  

Team Peace programs are now in two local schools, Orleans and Paoli and has expanded to serve approximately 900 students, grades K-12, in the 2022-2023 school year. 

Kara had been offering her programs at the schools as an independent contractor through her small business, So IN Body, but in the summer of 2022 she decided to start a nonprofit to help support the continued growth of the programs.  

While most of the programming that Team Peace offers is directly to students in the classroom during the school day, we have plans to expand the program to include supportive personal and professional development to educators and school staff.  We believe that adults that feel confident in their own ability to regulate their nervous systems and handle stress and conflict in healthy ways lead to children who learn these tools through example.  We want to support educators in feeling confident in practicing resilience-building tools for themselves and in finding creative ways to integrate these tools into their daily classroom routines.