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Personal Safety and Self Defense for children, teens and adultsHistory: who we are and how we started.History — Who we are and why we do this(by Executive Director and Co-Founder Irene van der Zande) HOW KIDPOWER BEGANThe inspiration for starting KIDPOWER happened in 1985 when my daughter was seven and my son was four. I had taken my children with six of my daughter's friends on a field trip in my home town of Santa Cruz, California. Suddenly, in the middle of the day in a public place with people standing all around, a man started charging towards us and shouted, “I am going to take one of these girls to be my bride!” To this day, I have a vivid image of those eight small children squeezed together into a terrified little huddle. Unfortunately, everyone watching us froze -- not because they were bad people, but because they did not know what to do. I stopped the man by stepping in between him and the children and yelling at him. I ordered a bystander to “get over here and HELP US!” When he did, the man threatening us ran away. The kids were fine because what they saw was that I yelled and the “bad guy” ran. But I wasn’t fine. I kept wondering, what if he’d knocked me down? What if he’d even touched one of the children with me? What unprotected child did he then go on to assault? Coming face-to-face with an attacker threatening my children, and at that moment, all of those children felt like my children, left me with a determination to do something that would make a difference in helping people everywhere, especially children and youth, to know how to use their own power to become safer and more confident. This frightening experience took away forever my belief that, “Bad things can never happen to me because I am a careful good person.” I took a self defense class to learn how to protect my children and was astonished at how much I learned about standing up for myself. Since I knew that I could not be with my children all the time, I wanted them to learn how to protect themselves. As I explored how to do this, I became determined to do something that would make a difference about helping to prevent personal violence and abuse for all people everywhere. My background is in nonprofit organizational management, doing trainings and projects with a wide variety of charitable and educational organizations in my community, and in child development. I had recently written 1,2,3...The Toddler Years, a book that is still used in many early childhood education programs and that has recently been translated into Dutch and Chinese. Were it not for KIDPOWER, I would probably be writing a book like, 19, 20, 21 — The Letting Go Years. My background was in non-profit organizational management; planning and implementation of services for people of a great range of ages, abilities, and difficult life challenges; and child development. As I learned skills for protecting myself, it was natural for me to use my background and experience to pull together experts in the martial arts, education, mental health, child safety, and law enforcement, along with parents and other caring adults, to create effective programs.
In our research, we found many excellent individuals and groups teaching different types of what we now call "People Safety" skills, but no organizations committed to developing and nurturing these people and bringing them together to pool and field-test their ideas with the goal of continuously improving and expanding what they teach in a truly comprehensive fashion. We found no organizations dedicated to seeking the resources necessary to make the learning of People Safety skills much more widely accessible for people from all walks of life. Founding Board President Ellen Bass and I incorporated KIDPOWER as a non-profit organization in 1989. KIDPOWER TEENPOWER FULLPOWER INTERNATIONAL TODAYAs we added programs for teens and adults, our organization evolved into becoming KIDPOWER TEENPOWER FULLPOWE Our mission is to help people of all ages and abilities learn how to stay safe, act wisely, and believe in themselves. We are committed to providing high quality services to those most in need. We teach People Safety Skills including personal safety, boundary-setting, self protection, self confidence, self-defense and advocacy through workshops that emphasize success-based practice. Our goal is to offer high quality services that are tailored to fit the needs of people of different ages and life situations. We believe that people learn best by doing, and all of our programs give our students the opportunity for upbeat, realistic practice of People Safety skills in contexts relevant to their daily lives. These skills can prevent most bullying, molestation, assault, abduction, and exploitation. The KIDPOWER success-based method of teaching helps build our students' beliefs that they are valuable, powerful, and competent. For a comprehensive description of the many people involved in the creation and success of KIDPOWER, see KIDPOWER – A Tapestry Woven by Many Different Hands. Please also see: |
Timothy Dunphy (pictured left with me circa 1991), who was at that time a 5th degree Black Belt and USTU national champion in Taekwondo, became my partner in the development of the KIDPOWER programs. During that time, I also co-founded The IMPACT Foundation (which is now our KIDPOWER Center in Southern California) and led the development of instructor training programs for full force self defense courses for women there for 5 years.
R International, though we are most commonly called just KIDPOWER. Today, KIDPOWER is a growing charitable educational international organization with representatives in many countries and states. Worldwide, we have served over a million individuals — 200,000 of these through our workshops and the remainder through our educational programs. Our work with children, teenagers and adults is endorsed by law enforcement and mental health professionals, parents and teachers, and other concerned people.