Founder of “Chicken Yoga For the Soul”Makes Waves in Beacon
Founder and director of “Chickens with Attitude,” — the poultry-friendly yoga practice — Karen Finnegan continues to bring her community in Beacon, NY together one fluffy bird at a time.
Finnegan has two children of her own that attend John Jay High School in Hopewell Junction, NY, and she has five step children as well. She was born in Brooklyn, NY but has also lived in New Jersey, Virginia and Albany, NY before settling into the Hudson Valley 15 years ago. Her family is first generation Italian and her grandparents emigrated from Italy into Ellis Island in the mid 1900s without knowing how to speak English.
With Finnegan’s passion in writing poetry and short stories, she majored in English at Siena College but she did not have a clear understanding of what she wanted to do with her life after she graduated. “After a few years post-graduation I got my first ‘real’ job working as the Director of Volunteers for Meals on Wheels and it was in that setting — working with volunteers and helping the community — that I really felt I had finally found what it was I was meant to do,” she says.
Finnegan organizes an event every December called,“Give a Cluck for Kids” that is based on the Meals-on-Wheels concept, but instead of senior citizens getting a hot meal, a volunteer delivers a gift to a child for the holiday season.
“The project was so rewarding — not just for the children but also the volunteers who were asked to go out on a route and deliver between 8–10 gifts to very excited children who were anticipating their arrival,” Finnegan says with a smile. “This year our plan is to reach over 200 children in Beacon, Fishkill and Wappingers and we were able to do this with the support of some terrific small business sponsors as well as a bunch of individual donations.”
At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Finnegan lost her job as a nonprofit development manager. Because running large-scale volunteer events during the pandemic was nearly impossible, Finnegan felt obligated to bring the community together through her yoga practice, “Chicken Yoga for the Soul.”
One of Finnegan’s children is immune compromised, but Chicken Yoga was an opportunity to socialize her own child and others outside during an isolated time while doing so safely, six feet apart and outside.
“Doing chicken yoga was a way to watch people smile, see them relax, be outside and keep myself sane and engaged with the world,”she says. Finnegan also said that her yoga practices are free of charge and welcome for all people that have different levels of experience.
Finnegan’s chickens have given her the opportunity to connect with people in her community and provide a service to people that can make them smile. Her latest project has combined her passions of writing and chickens with her first ever children’s book called “Jolene the Disability Awareness Chicken.” The book is dedicated to a chicken that she owned that was born with a disability, and she wanted to write a book that spread the message to kids about acceptance, disability and community.
“My plan is in the spring to tour around and do readings for children (with a chicken in tow!) and I have recently connected with a terrific new nonprofit called “The Foundation for Beacon Schools” which is a group that has been extremely supportive of the book and its message. We are in the process of planning a fundraising 5k for the spring in order to finance publishing the book!”
For more information about Finnegan’s book and her business “Chickens with Attitude,” visit: http://www.chickenswithattitude.com/ and http://www.jolenethechicken.com/.
