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Kidpower is pleased to be partnering with the Positive
Coaching Alliance (PCA) to provide two FREE webinars in February on how to protect kids from child abuse in youth sports.
The webinars include practical advice and tools to help coaches, youth leaders, and parents take charge of the safety of children in their care and take positive, effective action to prevent abuse and bullying. We would appreciate your help in letting people know about these important free opportunities by sharing this post with your friends, colleagues and social networks.
Note: Please See new page where webinars are hosted: Child Abuse Prevention in Youth Sports
Irene van der Zande, Kidpower Executive Director and Founder, will be a speaker along with Mike Town, a former trial judge involved in many child advocacy cases who also serves as a youth sports coach and PCA workshop leader. Jim Thompson, founder of PCA, will be the moderator. We will be answering questions we’ve heard many times over the years in our work, and there will be an opportunity for questions from the participants.
These free webinars will benefit Kidpower’s One Million Safer Kids campaign by educating and supporting a vital group of caring adults, who are committed to building character through youth sports, in the prevention of child abuse and bullying. We hope that the coaches, youth leaders, and parents we can reach through our partnership with PCA will have a strong ripple effect to helping make kids safer.
At Kidpower we’ve heard over and over about times when good people failed to protect the children in their care from abuse and bullying because they didn’t know what to do, they didn’t want to embarrass anyone, or they trusted someone they shouldn’t have. Recent sad stories also highlight how important it is that institutions have structures in place for preventing and addressing abuse and for ensuring that everyone understands and can follow them.
PCA Founder Jim Thompson says that PCA’s mission of providing all youth athletes a positive, character-building youth sports experience includes addressing ways to ensure children’s safety. “This concern is heightened by the allegations of child abuse against prominent coaches and youth sports leaders. So many parents involve their children in youth sports precisely because it is the best place to build character and learn life lessons, such as teamwork and overcoming adversity. We all, as leaders in the youth sports community, have the opportunity and obligation to make a difference – to do all we can to protect the kids in our programs by intentionally and deliberately creating organizational prevention measures, reporting policies and procedures for dealing with reports of abuse.”
We encourage you to watch one or both of these free webinars yourself and hope you will help us in sharing information about these webinars widely so we can reach as many caring adults involved in youth sports as possible. Short descriptions of both Kidpower and PCA are below this message.
About Kidpower
Kidpower Teenpower Fullpower International®, known as Kidpower® (www.kidpower.org), is highly recommended by experts worldwide for taking a positive, skills-based approach to protecting young people from bullying, abuse, and other violence. Instead of using fear to teach young people about violence prevention, the Kidpower Method™ makes it fun to learn to be safe, building habits that increase the skills and confidence of kids, parents, teachers and other caring adults that can last a lifetime.
Kidpower has served more than 2 million people of all ages and abilities, since its founding in 1989, offering workshops and an extensive free and low-cost library of articles, podcasts, blog posts, teaching kits and books, such as Bullying – What Adults Need to Know and Do to Keep Kids Safe, the Kidpower Safety Comics, and The Kidpower Book for Caring Adults, a comprehensive resource for adults who want to learn how to protect the emotional and physical safety of the young people in their lives. Kidpower’s newest global initiative is the “One Million Safer Kids” campaign which has a goal of making at least one million young people safer from bullying, violence, and abuse through greater awareness, action, and skills by July 1, 2016 or sooner.
About Positive Coaching Alliance
Founded as a non-profit within the Stanford University Athletic Department in 1998, Positive Coaching Alliance (PCA) is committed to providing all youth and high school athletes a positive, character-building youth sports experience. To that end, PCA has conducted more than 10,000 live group workshops nationwide for more than 475,000 youth and high school sports coaches, parents, student-athletes and school/organizational leaders. Through workshops and companion online courses, PCA has impacted more than 4 million youth.
PCA’s partnership network includes more than 1,700 youth sports organizations, cities and schools. In 2012, PCA will conduct roughly 1,200 live, group workshops across the U.S., while assisting tens of thousands of other individuals via online courses at www.PositiveCoach.org.
Published: January 25, 2012 | Last Updated: July 24, 2012
Irene van der Zande, Kidpower Founder and Executive Director
Kidpower Founder and Executive Irene van der Zande is a master at teaching safety through stories and practices and at inspiring others to do the same. Her child protection and personal safety expertise has been featured by USA Today, CNN, Today Moms, the LA Times, and The Wall Street Journal. Publications include: cartoon-illustrated Kidpower Safety Comics and Kidpower Teaching Books curriculum; Bullying: What Adults Need to Know and Do to Keep Kids Safe; the Relationship Safety Skills Handbook for Teens and Adults; Earliest Teachable Moment: Personal Safety for Babies, Toddlers, and Preschoolers; The Kidpower Book for Caring Adults: Personal Safety, Self-Protection, Confidence, and Advocacy for Young People, and the Amazon Best Seller Doing Right by Our Kids: Protecting Child Safety at All Levels.
