Katie Allen is a public health researcher and integrative health program director with more than 20 years of experience designing, implementing, and evaluating community-based yoga therapy and lifestyle medicine interventions across clinical, nonprofit, and underserved-population settings. She is Co-Founder and CEO of Be The Change Yoga, one of the nation’s leading community-based yoga therapy education and implementation centers, and Co-Founder and Executive Director of the AlcheMē Natural Health Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to integrative health research, workforce development, and community wellness initiatives.
Katie received her Master’s degree in Public Health from Tulane University, where she wrote her thesis on yoga’s ability to prevent and treat chronic disease, building on a Master’s in Public Health Studies from Brown University. She completed her yoga therapy training in 2007 at Loyola Marymount University under Dr. Larry Payne, and went on to study at the Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram in Chennai, India. She has been a Certified Yoga Therapist (C-IAYT) since 2009 and is also an Ayurveda Wellness Counselor (AWC) certified through the Sevanti Institute.
Over the past two decades, Katie has led more than 15,000 hours of group yoga therapy facilitation and over 7,000 hours of yoga teacher and yoga therapist training. Her implementation work spans formal partnerships with UCI Health’s Susan Samueli Integrative Health Institute, Hoag Hospital’s Center for Healthy Living, CHOC Children’s Hospital, and three Federally Qualified Health Centers across Orange County, where she has designed and delivered trilingual (English, Spanish, Korean) yoga therapy and health education programming for patients, providers, and underserved community members. Her work has supported IRB-approved research, including studies on yoga therapy for children with sensory processing disorder and peer-reviewed feasibility trials in older adults and adolescents with chronic health conditions.
In 2013, Katie co-founded Be The Change Yoga in Irvine, California, where she and her teaching partner Allison Prince have led Yoga Teacher Training programs since 2010. In 2016, she launched Orange County’s first and only Yoga Therapist Training program, and she now serves as Founding School Director for the IAYT-accredited AlcheMē Yoga Therapy (AYT) training program, an 825-hour curriculum focused on the clinical application of yoga therapy. Through Yoga Promotores, the scholarship and job-placement program she founded in 2017, Katie continues to expand access to yoga therapy careers for underserved community members, advancing health equity and workforce diversity within the field.
Katie loves sharing the life-enhancing wisdom of the Yoga Sutras as a way to upgrade every single aspect of life and sustain positive health behavior change. She is passionate about bringing empowerment-based lifestyle medicine principles out of the yoga studio and into underserved communities, as well as into hospitals and health systems. She utilizes her background in public health to effectively build community-based yoga therapy and health education programs that improve personal and community health, while training the next generation of integrative health providers.
A frequent speaker at the Symposium on Yoga Therapy and Research, UCI Medical School, the Orange County Medical Association, and Kaiser Permanente, Katie continues to bridge the worlds of clinical medicine and yoga therapy, building the evidence base and workforce infrastructure the field needs to scale.