Kidpower Progress Report for the 2008-2009 Fiscal Year
Services
Internationally, Kidpower served an estimated 50,000 children, teens, and adults, including those with special needs, through our People Safety skills workshops, parent education, training of professionals, and educational resources. Over 20,000 of these people were served through direct workshops and over 30,000 were served by access to our educational resources. Of these people, over 20,000 were in California, and the rest were in different locations around the US and the world.
The Kidpower International Central Office organizes and teaches workshops in California and provides support to over 30 offices and centers from around the US and the world that are bringing the Kidpower program to their communities.
Highlights of our Services
Workshops in California
Our workshops prepare children, teens, and adults, including those with special needs, to build healthy relationships and to take charge of their emotional and physical safety. We also train parents, teachers, and program staff in how to use the Kidpower program to benefit their families, schools, and organizations.
People served by workshops include both our participants and, when we offer parent/caregiver education or training for professionals, their children, students, and clients.
During the 08-09 fiscal year, our California Center taught workshops to 4,361 children, 300 teens, 417 adults for their own training, 1,806 parents, 953 staff, for a total number of 7,834 served. In addition, as a result of our staff trainings, 2,350 children, 830 teens, and 1,930 adults also directly benefited from these workshops.
We worked with over 115 groups, including:
- 18 groups supporting people with disabilities, including school/district special ed departments;
- 16 groups supporting people dealing with domestic violence or homelessness (shelters, foster care, and resource centers);
- 18 groups providing activities for kids and/or support for parents, including after school care and parents clubs;
- 56 schools or district-run programs, excluding special education; and
- 7 private groups
Participants evaluating our workshops reported that over 99% of them found the program valuable for themselves and/or their children because they knew more about how to keep themselves and others safe. Over 95% of those in staff training reported that they felt better prepared to explain and teach personal safety skills to their students or clients.
Services in Other States and Countries
With the ongoing support of our international organization through training, coaching, and review, our Centers and offices outside of California served a combined total of over 30,000 people – over 10,000 through different kinds of workshops and over 20,000 through access to our educational resources.
Kidpower programs were taught in Arabic, Dutch, French, German, Spanish, Swedish, Urdu, and many other languages and have been found to be effective for a wide range of cultures with only minor adaptations. Locations in the US include California, Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, Nebraska, New York, Texas, and Vermont. International locations where we have centers or representatives include Belgium, Brazil, Canada (Montreal and Vancouver), India, Lebanon, Mexico, New Zealand, Germany, Pakistan, Sweden, Switzerland, and Viet Nam.
Collaborations with other agencies creates an exponential effect on our services. For example, we established an agreement with Save the Children Lebanon so they can use Kidpower curriculum to create a “first of it’s kind” handbook about child abuse prevention in Arabic. Zeina Hobeiche, a therapist who works with abused children in Lebanon, found us through Google and came here for training.
Save the Children was so impressed by the Kidpower skills Zeina is teaching that they are going to sponsor a series of trainings for professionals throughout the region. The National Director of Save the Children Lebanon said that she asked a young man from a camp for war refugees what he thought about Zeina’s workshop and he said that what they learned was extremely important to protecting children from abuse and that everyone working and living in these camps needed this training.
Instructor Training and Center Development
Our January 2009 Kidpower Instructor Program prepared 10 new people to teach Kidpower from current and new locations. Our 20 year celebration conference provided in-service training for 50 people from our community of instructors and board members.
Our training of trainers program prepared very experienced instructors to join our training team and to oversee the fieldwork phase of our training program in their own communities. We helped our less-experienced long-distance centers by e-mail, telephone, and Skype conversations to organize and teach workshops. For example, our India instructors received a training in Puppet Power to prepare them to work with younger children in local child care centers.
We provided our more experienced centers with consulting on adapting curriculum for different projects, strategic planning, and applying for grants. For example, the Kidpower International office provided curriculum and expertise to help our New Zealand Center be awarded a two-year $100,000 government grant to use our skills for sexual abuse prevention for developmentally delayed teens and young adults. We also provided support and materials so that our Montreal Center was awarded a four-year $250,000 grant to greatly expand our services to seniors.
Curriculum Development
By adapting and expanding our curriculum, Kidpower is creating new resources for increasing the accessibility of our Successful Practice Method for teaching People Safety skills. Highlights of our curriculum development activities included:
Bridges to People Safety Skills for Individuals Who Have Very Limited Verbal Skills
Kidpower received a three-year $20,000 a year grant from the Special Hope Foundation to help Kidpower to develop tools for preparing professionals and family members wanting to teach People Safety skills to individuals with little or no ability to speak. Our own experienced instructors can do this very well, but our materials and training for helping others to teach need to be adapted for this very vulnerable group of people. In these current economic times, this level of support from this small family foundation was a huge validation of our work. The needs assessment phase of the project is currently underway.
Police Officer Pilot Training
Thanks to funding from the Driscoll’s Charitable Foundation, we conducted a very successful pilot training for police officers in Watsonville through their role-calls at 6 a.m., 1 p.m. and 6 p.m. According to Manny Solano, Deputy Chief of Police, Watsonville Police Department, “I have been proud to be on the Advisory Board for Kidpower for over a decade. I have seen first-hand the effectiveness of the Kidpower training in building community safety and in giving people effective skills for preventing domestic and relationship violence, abuse, and abduction. The pilot training that Kidpower provided for our officers was extremely useful in giving them more tools as “front-line” social workers who are often needing to help people in crisis, especially young people, and we are exploring different ways that we can continue to integrate Kidpower resources into our department. Funding support of Kidpower in developing training and tools to help increase safety in relationships would be greatly valuable to the law enforcement field.” We are currently seeking funding to implement this program on a wider level.
Publication of The Fullpower Relationship Safety Book
This tool for professionals working with teens and adults who need support in building safe and strong relationships was used to train over 100 staff serving over 800 people in shelters, domestic violence prevention programs, and programs for at-risk teens.
Publication of the Kidpower Safety Comics for Adults With Older Children Ages 9 to 13
This entertaining and useful comic book shows adults how to discuss and practice skills with their children and fills the gap between our Kidpower Safety Comics for Adults With Younger Children and our Fullpower Safety Comics for Teens and Adults. One parent wrote, “My ten-year-old daughter took this book and read it cover to cover right away – a great sign of approval.”
Impact Teen Drivers
Impact Teen Drivers has a mission of teaching new teen drivers and their teen passengers about the dangers of driving while distracted. Kidpower adapted our curriculum about how to use awareness and boundary-setting skills to address this very important issue so that they could incorporate these practices into their program.
Articles and E-Newsletter
Over 8,000 people receive our e-newsletter, and we have between 300-500 visitors a day to our website. We receive reports from people who are using our materials to help improve their own programs and to learn more about how to keep themselves and their families safe. We also responded to tragic events such as the Tracy kidnapping with information that focused on what parents can do to prepare their children to explore their world with safety and confidence. Here are just two of many examples.
A nonprofit teaching middle school children to use peer counseling skills in Ghana researched the Internet to find resources that they could use to start a safety program in their community. They used many of the free articles on our website to create a curriculum that they found to be very successful. At a result, they decided that they want to start a Kidpower Center and are finding their own funding to bring one of their leaders here for training as an instructor.
Gail Lyall, Program Director of The Children's Connection (formerly Big Brothers Big Sisters) in Mount Vernon, Ohio, wrote, “I cannot tell you how timely and important your message is of Men as Allies to children. Our agency recently lost funding for next year because we find it difficult to recruit men as mentors. I explained that men are very, very reluctant to step forward because they are frightened of being accused of something. I was told basically that it was our agency's problem and that I needed to find a way to eliminate the ‘barriers.’ This is a national problem! I am taking your article and giving each board member a copy of it as well as the funder who has withdrawn support. You have just bolstered this agency's credibility 100%. THANK YOU!!"
Capacity-Building
We made significant progress in implementing several capacity-building projects so that we can greatly expand our services and build a strong sustainable infrastructure to support our organization into the future. Highlights include:
Website Improvement Project
The Taproot Foundation awarded Kidpower $50,000 worth of services for a team of volunteer experts to redesign our website. This team did a marketing analysis, conducted a needs assessment with our key stakeholders, created an exciting design with a much better navigating system, developed templates, edited all our main pages, and provided training to our staff in what we needed to do to make the site ready to launch. The redesigned site now provides greatly improved access to our information and resources that are proving to be so relevant in communities close to home and around the world.
Donor Relations Program
Thanks to a $50,000 challenge grant from an anonymous private family foundation that also gave a $20,000 supplement grant for general support, Kidpower was able to establish a donor relations program that turned out to be crucial in our weathering the difficult economic situation as well as we did.
The purpose of the Donor Relations Program is to build Kidpower’s short-term relationships with workshop participants and organizations into long-term relationships generating ongoing support. The funding we received and generated thanks to the challenge grant provided staff support for this project and allowed us to field-test different ideas, develop much better systems for staying in touch with people, and create more effective materials.
Our Donor Relations program was crucial in terms of maintaining financial stability during an extremely challenging economic time. Because of the communication systems we were able to develop, we were able to keep most of our current donors, even if their funding levels needed to be reduced, and to develop new supporters.
Unfortunately, like most nonprofits, our income did drop significantly, and we did lose some of our corporate and foundation partners for the time being. However, Kidpower was able to continue to offer a high level of service even with reduced funding.
Evaluation Project
The purpose of the Kidpower Evaluation Project is to conduct evaluation studies and activities that will make Kidpower eligible for accreditation for state and federal funding as well as larger-scale foundation funding and that will help us keep our quality high as we grow. Our ultimate 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.
Thanks to a grant from the Ruddie Memorial Youth Foundation, we were able to hire evaluation expert Julie Shattuck to create an evaluation plan for Kidpower, to find resources to implement this plan, to conduct a fidelity study, and to conduct a pilot before/after study with a comparision group. Julie made it possible for us to be awarded consultation time from a state agency that helps organizations like ours meet state accreditation standards. With the expertise of this consultant and of Julie, we designed a before/after study with a comparison group that will start in January, 2010. We will be doing the study in 3rd grade classrooms with a simple written evaluation for the children and a more extensive one for the teachers.
Julie also opened doors for Kidpower to be considered for the federal Service to Science program. The local study funded by our grant from the Ruddie Memorial Youth Foundation will be used as part of this application. If successful, being approved for a Service to Science grant could potentially provide major multi-year funding to implement a much larger study of our services. Kidpower is currently one of two California nominees by the National Prevention Network (NPN) for the Service to Science Regional Academy. The Academy is designed to provide programs with the education, tools, and technical assistance needed to develop a competitive application.