Personal Safety Skills Empower and Protect People With Special Needs
Practicing how to set boundaries.
People of all ages with disabilities or other special needs are especially vulnerable to facing bullying, abuse, or assault. We’ve been successful in teaching self-protection and personal safety skills to tens of thousands of children, teens, and adults with difficult life challenges such as: developmental delays; difficulty with vision, hearing, or mobility; or personal struggles with domestic violence, homelessness, substance abuse, or being a survivor of childhood sexual abuse.
- What skills do we teach for people with disabilities?
- What do professionals say about Kidpower for people with disabilities?
- What about services for people facing other life challenges?
- What if we can’t get to a workshop?
Skills for People with Disabilities
Our workshops are tailored to work with the strengths of every single student. We make adaptations for how different people’s bodies and minds work, focusing on what they can do, rather than what they cannot not. We teach the full spectrum of People Safety skills including:
- Being and acting aware
- Setting boundaries
- Staying safe from bullying or verbal attack
- Getting help
- Staying safe while riding public transit;
- Making safe choices with support tools such as canes, service dogs, and wheelchairs
- Learning effective physical self-defense skills without being able to see the target or while seated in a wheelchair.
Kidpower Teaching Method: How do we teach these skills?
We work with participants and their supporters to identify their strengths and then to work with those strengths to stay safe. Thousands of students of all cognitive and physical abilities have found our services to be relevant, interesting, and well-suited for their own ways of moving, thinking, perceiving, and communicating.
Our workshops offer a safe and secure environment for “learning by doing” through role-play and positive examples. We focus on what people have the power to do, not on what they can’t do, and we have fun while developing powerful and practical skills. We work with partner organizations and schools to find funding so that their students and participants can have the opportunity to learn these skills, and we provide Training of Professionals so that educators, social workers, and other staff can integrate our program into their curriculum and activities
What about services for people facing other life challeneges?
For each of us, our belief in our right to be safe and in our ability to protect ourselves is the biggest self-protection tool we have. Belief in one’s power to take charge of one’s safety can be seriously damaged for individuals who are survivors of assault, child abuse, domestic violence or a hate crime or who are struggling with personal issues such as homelessness, poverty, or substance abuse.
Our workshops help people to develop a strong set of safety skills within the context of the effect of past experiences on how to weigh options and make safe choices.
Our goal is to provide our participants with tools to make choices and take action that will help them stay physically and emotionally safe while acknowledging and respecting the hard issues they face.
Our workshops for the general public are appropriate for most students who have difficult life challenges. We also provide Teenpower and Fullpower workshops for participants and Training of Professionals for staff of homeless shelters, domestic violence prevention programs, organizations helping people who are targets of prejudice, alcohol and drug treatment programs, and organizations supporting survivors of childhood sexual abuse
What if we can’t get to a workshop?
Our Library offers a wealth of free resources, including articles about how personal safety skills can address difficult life challenges, such as:
- Unlimited Adaptability: Teaching “People Safety Skills” to Individuals With Different Abilities
- Safety Signs for Literal People and Those With Limited Speech
- Self-Protection for People With Disabilities
- Personal Safety to Help Stop Domestic Violence
- Substance Abuse Prevention
Our Store sells publications such as our cartoon-illustrated Safety Comics and Teaching Kits for children, teens, and adults that introduce personal safety skills in basic language that individuals with limited reading skills as well as the general public have found to be important, respectful, and relevant. Our Store also sells our Kidpower Guide eBook, our Kidpower Book for Caring Adults, our Relationship Safety Book, and our Comprehensive Program Manuals. These materials show how to teach People Safety skills and concepts to the important children, teens, and adults in your life.
If you don’t have a Kidpower center close to your community, consider setting up a new one and training as an instructor. We also train teachers and other professionals to include People Safety Skills in their programs and schools so that people everywhere can learn how to protect their emotional and physical safety.