Oom Yung [email protected]

Oom Yung Doe Kirkland seeks to help our community improve Health and Wellness through Traditional Martial Arts Training. Our goal is to provide opportunities for members of our community to benefit from the practice of Traditional Martial Arts through programs such as Women's Self Defense, Children's Anti-Bullying Training, Stress Relief Seminars in addition to the Traditional Martial Arts Black Belt Programs.

We offer Traditional Martial Arts training for community members seeking general fitness, mental focus, and improved physical condition. We offer free seminars to the community for children's safety, senior mobility, women's self-defense, stress relief, and more. Currently our Women's Self Defense and Stress Relief programs are offered every month and we are working to expand these so that more of our community can benefit. We are also working on expanding our children's programs for physical and mental benefit to include weeklong camp style programs at least three times over the year.

Over the past couple of years, we have been able to establish our core community programs in addition to our long term black belt training programs. Our next steps are to start making contacts with other organizations and business in our community to improve access to the programs and spread the word about the benefits that can be gained through Traditional Martial Arts. In addition to the growth in our community programs, we are also working on improving our instructional team and our systems for supporting our long term black belt programs across multiple physical locations.

The desire to see individuals achieve their most authentic, best self and through these individuals build a stronger more peaceful community. We see over and over again just how much the individuals who take training with us, whether it's for a day or for years, benefit from the programs we offer. The passion and dedication to plan for how we bring our programs to our broader community are all in place. Our biggest limiting factor is our ability to train new members of our Instructional team fast enough to meet the growing demand for our programs. We are working to update, improve, and formalize our training process to make it more accessible. With a stronger, more robust system in place to support our Instructional Team, we will be able to focus on the networking and marketing that will be necessary to expand our programs deeper into our community.

This past year (2022) marks our 5th year as a non-profit, though Traditional Martial Arts has been around longer. We can proudly say that while it's been a journey full of unexpected challenges and learning to grow in new directions, we are doing exactly that - growing. Even with the pandemic related setbacks and challenges for programs that rely heavily on in-person training, the individuals who connect with our programs consistently express how much they have benefited from the programs.

We are now operating our long term black belt training programs across multiple locations, including one location with over 100 active students. In addition to our long term programs, we have also increased access to our Women's Self-Defense courses by 19% over pre-pandemic levels and continue to grow our Stress Relief Community programs as well. These are really strong results and demonstrate the need for our programs. In order to continue this growth, we will need to make connections outside of our immediate schools and take the programs into large businesses and other organizations in our area.

This is a huge transition for us and we are excited to see others stepping in to help who share our passion. We are looking forward to continuing to build these programs and more in the coming years.