I hope that this note finds each of you happy and well.
I am especially glad to be able to tell you that we’ve heard from TuTrinh, Director of our Kidpower France Center, that all of her family and friends are safe, though of course deeply upset by the attacks in Paris. I feel honored that TuTrinh translated our Safety Comes From Inside Ourselves: Protecting Emotional Safety After a Terrorist Attack article into French and posted it on the Kidpower France website. If you know anyone who speaks French, please share this link with them:
http://kidpowerfrance.org/la-
For me, sharing Kidpower always helps to bring balance and joy to my life.
Last week, I had the fun of teaching a two-hour Parent-Child workshop for Gault Elementary School in Santa Cruz as part of our Keeping our Kids SAFE campaign to bring Kidpower skills to every family in the county that wants our program.
My kids went to Gault School. And the experience that inspired the creation of Kidpower happened when I took a group of girls from my daughter’s second grade classroom on a field trip in 1985 and ended up protecting them from a man who was threatening to kidnap them.
Many things have changed since then, but not the school’s auditorium. The old wooden stage is the same one my kids were on for various school activities and made a perfect shelf for my papers and books.
People have mobile phones now (hard to imagine that none of us had them then) but everyone put them away without my even having to ask.
Even though the children had had a long day at school and many of them had also been at the after-school program, they were enthusiastic, even the older ones, and volunteered for everything.
The translator did a wonderful job of flowing with me for the Spanish-speaking parents, so that it was almost simultaneous.
Casey Coonerty Protti from the Education Foundation which had funded the workshops for Santa Cruz City Schools, came to thank everyone and to ask parents to lobby their school and the district to make Kidpower an ongoing part of the school’s curriculum.
There were moments during the workshop when parents would think about the some of the reasons for what we were doing and get a little teary – but I smiled at them and they smiled back and stayed with our upbeat mood.
Afterwards, one of the mothers helped me carry things to my car. Suddenly, she threw her arms around me and said, “Thank you, Irene. THANK YOU!”
And I thought, everything we’ve done for all these years to make this happen for so many people has been WORTH IT!
And each of you has been and is part of making this happen.
Classes are terrific opportunities for learning Kidpower in places where we have instructors – and our online Library, coaching conference calls, books, and partnerships are making our programs accessible to people everywhere. Many of our website visitors write to tell us that Kidpower is the best resource they have found after searching the Internet for help with problems involving bullying, harassment, abuse, abduction, and other violence. One visitor emailed us to say, “Kidpower brings us a message of hope in a sometimes scary world.”
For those of you who celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday in the US, I wish you a wonderful time with your loved ones.
And for ALL of you, I hope that you have a week full of joy, community, safety, and love.
