Thread: Teaching "special interest" or pre-existing groups

Because of some personal connection, I've been thinking about reaching out to offer classes to special interest groups like breast cancer survivor groups, or even to more social organizations like red hat groups or the like. Has anyone taught pre-existing groups like this--either for a one-time only or ongoing? If so, how did you approach it--like a class or more like an extended bellygram with lots of audience participation?

For groups like red hat ladies, I do a 'shimmy party' -- a mini-performance and then a lesson. It's the same thing I do for bridal showers.

I charge $175 (for comparison, grams in my area are $125).

If they balk at the price, I'll suggest leaving out the costumed performance and doing just the lesson (in dressed-up teacher mode) for less money.

For breast cancer survivors, I'm less of a 'costumed character for your party' and more of a serious teacher. Still entertaining and fun, I hope, but here they're trying it out as an exercise form rather than looking to fill their meeting time. I also take MUCH less money -- our local cancer group offered a $25 'stipend' which was just enough to pay a student to sub my regular class so I could do it, but I was still happy to do so.

Lauren:

Thanks for much! Did you approach the breast cancer survivors group directly? Was it part of an overall marketing plan to special groups?
Or was it more by chance?

They called me and asked me if I'd come teach the class. I'm not sure where they heard about me, an employee or member of the group may have been in one of my classes or something?

I'm planning to donate a free class to breast cancer survivors in December. I am working with a surgeon who specializes 100% in breast cancer surgeries. She will announce the class to her patients, and she will arrange for the studio and the marketing to her patients.

Now, the surgeon lives a 7-hour drive from me, so this class that I"m donating is a one-time thing that I will do when I visit her, not an ongoing weekly thing.

I intend to teach it like a typical "introduction to belly dance" class. I'll try to make it fun, but at the same time it'll be dance instruction.


I have taught a 2-hour "intro to belly dance" class in the past to members of a local chapter of the Blue Thong Society (google it). In their case, I charged my regular one-off class rate, and again I used a "dance instruction" format that I tried to make fun for them.

I think that working with breast cancer survivors is a wonderful thing for you to do! When I was in radiation therapy school, I did a research project about the benefits of dance therapy for breast cancer survivors. All across the board, dance has a positive effect on cancer survivors' body image (which can really take a hit after surgery), and it improves patients' ability to increase their upper body mobility after surgery and/or radiation.

This website was VERY helpful to me in my research, it is a dance method specifically for breast cancer survivors, as well as seniors in general and people living with other kinds of illnesses, that incorporates gentle movements from many kinds of dance, including bellydance. The Lebed Method

I suggest being very diligent about paying attention to the mobility limitations that lumpectomy/mastectomy/radiation patients encounter; many of my mastectomy patents had a difficult time even just raising their arm even a little bit for their radiation treatments.

Thank you Nimah, Shira and Lauren for your comments. This has really been helpful as I set some goals for teaching for the next year--I can't believe 2009 is almost here.

My teacher is a breast cancer survivor and I know that dance helped her through this (she danced before and after). Interesting bit of info, they had to remove glands from her arm so she has problems with swelling especially when using that arm to push, pull, hold weight and stuff like that so if you take them through a warm up that is something that you may want to take into account.

Thanks Linnyg---your teacher sounds like she must be a real inspiration. I'm starting to do more research on working with breast cancer survivors and that type of swelling seems to be fairly common. Does your teacher use different methods to teach certain upper body or arm moves such as snake arms because of this swelling condition?

I don't know if she teaches anyone else with the same issues. I know that there are times that she just has to watch as we do planks and she has to wear her compression arm thing when she dances or the swelling gets really bad.
Last night I watched her perform (she doesn't wear the compression thing when performing) and by the end of her 20 minute set, another dancer had to rip her gauntlet off beacause her arm had swolen so much she couldn't get it over her wrist.

Shira and Aziyade were both gathering info to teach breast cancer survivors, someone should start a thread on that topic so everyone can compare notes!