KIDPOWER's vision is to bring People Safety skills to children, teens, and adults, including people with special needs, both close to home and around the world. To reach this goal, we must grow our infrastructure along with our services.
The KIDPOWER Challenge grant, which will support our donor development program, is the bridge to raising the funds we need to expand in order to achieve our vision. All donations to The KIDPOWER Challenge will be doubled by an anonymous donor up to $50,000, assuming we meet our goal of raising an additional $50,000 in matching funds.
By donating to The KIDPOWER Challenge, you will be helping us build our capacity, allowing us to bring People Safety skills to those most in need.
Funds from our donor development program will help to support the following initiatives:
KIDPOWER Initiatives by Funds Spent
1. Our 'Earliest Teachable Moment' initiative provides children and youth, especially those from at-risk and ethnically diverse families who are growing up in poverty or facing special life challenges, with the tools, skills, and confidence to make positive life choices and realize their fullest potential. The children's learning is extended through training and coaching for parents and caregivers on how to teach People Safety skills on their own in an ongoing way. This is a unique and innovative way of addressing self-esteem, self-confidence, advocacy, and physical and emotional safety issues potentially blocking children from becoming school-ready or taking full advantage of their educational opportunities. It deals with the potentially crippling effects bullying, harassment, violence, and abuse can have on children's health and social and academic skill development. Our project goal is to address these underlying problems, where possible, before the point of incidence, starting from the time that children become able to understand at age 3.
2. Our 'Bullying Prevention and Positive Peer Interaction' initiative helps youth forge new patterns in social interaction and overcome major barriers to academic and personal achievement through building their peer interaction and boundary-setting skills consistently throughout K-6 grade levels. This program addresses how negative peer interactions, emotional and physical bullying, and violence and abuse among and against children affect their positive self-image and self-esteem and pose a major barrier to their succeeding and thriving in school and life. Research indicates that in order to promote the health, safety, and well-being of children, their families, and of communities overall, the immediate problems and the negative effects of these issues need to be addressed at the source. By addressing peer interaction dynamics proactively as part of the elementary school's curriculum and by building the students' peer interaction and boundary-setting skills for a variety of contexts – in the classroom, on the playground, in the lunchroom, and in online or mobile technology environments – consistently throughout the elementary grade levels, we help dismantle a major barrier to academic and personal achievement as well as physical and emotional safety.
3. Our 'Vaccine Against Violence and Abuse' initiative helps victims of (domestic and/or relationship) violence, abuse and assault protect themselves from re-victimization and helps others at-risk but not yet victimized from suffering violence and abuse in the first place by providing them with tools and strategies that have demonstrated performance and effectiveness in promoting physical and emotional safety. The initiative focuses on children, women, and people with physical and developmental disabilities. By addressing survivors as well as people not yet victimized, the training serves as both a remedy and a vaccine.
4. Our 'Creating Cultures of Caring, Respect and Safety For All' initiative provides a comprehensive range of services to prepare middle and high schools and health and human services agencies to integrate People Safety skills and concepts into their ongoing programs in a sustainable way.
5. Our 'Reaching Out to the Two-Thirds World' initiative prepares professionals from NGOs in developing countries to adapt the KIDPOWER system of teaching People Safety skills to help prevent violence and abuse against young people who are living and/or working on the street, who are being exploited because of economic vulnerability, or whose communities have been disrupted by war, disease, or natural disaster. Although the direct funds for this initiative represent a small percentage of our budget now, the resources created by the other initiatives are being shared widely with these professionals.
Find out more about the KIDPOWER Challenge by clicking HERE.
