A wellness studio built specifically for women of colour has opened its first location in Toronto.
The Villij is a wellness club co-founded by colleagues turned best friends Kim Knight and Shanelle McKenzie.
Knight and McKenzie met while seeking a moment of refuge in the bathrooms of their former corporate employer. It was there they first got to talking and quickly connected over their desire for inclusivity, specifically in wellness spaces.
“It was almost love at first sight,” McKenzie said during an interview with Now Toronto. From their initial conversation, the two identified a niche that was yet to be fully explored, wellness services provided by women of colour (WOC) for women of colour.
In 2017, six months after meeting, McKenzie and Knight launched their first yoga class.
“That was a beautiful time because we realized that 60 per cent of the women that had come had never wanted to try yoga before because of the lack of representation…so we knew we were onto something,” McKenzie explained.
The entrepreneurial duo told Now Toronto that as a demographic WOC are frequently overlooked and underrepresented in the wellness space, which was a huge factor in prompting them to create The Villij.
When Knight and McKenzie first launched the concept they wanted to hone in on their shared experiences, specifically when it came to being othered. That’s why their new studio and all of their programming places women of colour firmly in the centre, “they can enter our space and feel like they belong,” Knight said.
The pair are backed by a team of experts, whose skills span from therapy to meditation, all of whom are WOC with similar experiences to the Villij founders.
“When they create they create off of intention and based off of what they would have liked to see in the wellness space as well,” McKenzie and Knight told Now.
WOC have a subset of needs that require both individual attention and community to be met, The Villij co-founders explained. While intersectionality exists, the women the Villij serves are often subject to a multi-faceted set of challenges.
“There’s a lot of generational trauma which stems from scarcity and the need to really survive. A lot of us are first-generation Canadians and we didn’t get to see our parents have the luxury of indulging in wellness…so we are really trying to show our community at large that it’s OK, you don’t have to earn rest and you don’t have to earn being well,” McKenzie explained.
For some women who use The Villij’s facilities, wellness as a concept is relatively new, so McKenzie and Knight do their utmost to encourage their clients to take time for themselves and to discover and explore what wellness can mean for them.
The Villij’s mantra is “you deserve to be well,” a line often employed by its yoga instructors during classes to remind participants that they are worthy of rest, but most importantly that they deserve to be healthy within a community.
“My mental health improved when I started to be in community more frequently,” McKenzie said with candour. “We are raising each other in so many different ways and I think that that’s really important when we look at the wellness journey as well,” she concluded.
In the new year, The Villij is looking to expand its services into group therapy with a focus on issues stemming from anxiety and generational trauma.
Before the introduction of their new physical space, The Villij had steadily built an online community across Canada, and one day hopes to offer in-person experiences in different cities throughout the country and beyond.
The Villij is located at 5 Dickens Street, for further details on its services, click here
