Personal Safety and Self Defense for children, teens and adults

KIDPOWER Evaluation Project

"What PROOF is there that KIDPOWER actually works?"

For years, we have had very positive evaluations and feedback from our workshop participants, including many success stories of people using their personal safety skills both to improve their daily lives and to stop dangerous situations. Almost all of the people who have had a direct experience with our services in any form give KIDPOWER a very high rating for importance, effectiveness, and competence.

 In 2004, the effectiveness of our services for young children was documented in a more formal way through an outside professional evaluation of our KIDPOWER program conducted by LaFrance Associates with funding from the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children’s Health.

Almost 95% of the parents and caregivers of over 550 Head Start children from multi-cultural low-income families observed that their children were safer because of their KIDPOWER training. Parents and caregivers reported that most of these 3 to 5-year-old children remembered most of the skills four to nine months after the training. Over 90% reported that they personally felt better prepared to explain safety skills to their children.

 To see a summary of the Head Start study, click here. (PDF 300k)

Thanks to funding from the Todd Foundation, a similar study was conducted in 2005 by the Evaluation and Auditing Service Limited with 840 8 to 12-year-old students and their teachers in New Zealand. Both teachers and children reported after three months that the students used the skills to reduce conflict, that learning the skills increased their confidence and reduced their anxiety, and that they found that the program was “fun.”

To see a summary of the New Zealand study, click here.

Kim Leisey, Ph.D., conducted her doctoral dissertation in 2002 on the effects of self-protection training of early adolescent girls trained by KIDPOWER and another organization. Her research indicated that KIDPOWER has all of the elements that the girls defined as being important for their training to help them both feel and be safer.  

Currently, thanks to a grant from the Ruddie Memorial Youth Foundation,  the evaluation firm of Shattuck & Associates will over the next 16 months be:

• Conducting a review of our current and former evaluations and organizing this information in a way that helps to documents our effectiveness;

• Preparing a five-year evaluation plan that builds on the work already done and is realistic within our current resources;

• Designing and implementing a formative evaluation study for the organization as a whole; and

• Designing and implementing a local outcome evaluation study.

Our objective is to align KIDPOWER  with evidence-based programs in the prevention program community and in the positive child/youth development community as a tool to expand our program to more settings and to become a stronger candidate for foundation and government funding.