Our goal is for every person, regardless of age, gender, race, or physical or mental ability, to be able to go where they want, when they want, day or night, feeling comfortable and safe moving through their daily lives.
Meet The Team
Herstory
In 1984, the seeds for Impact Personal Safety were planted when our founder, Lisa Gaeta, took her first “Model Mugging” class. Once she fought off the mugger for the first time, she knew her life was changed forever. She trained to become an instructor and soon after began to develop the verbal skills curriculum, which is now so prevalent in most IMPACT training around the globe. Because of this work, in conjunction with the writings of Gavin De Becker in his groundbreaking book, The Gift of Fear, our ‘verbals’ have become our defining feature, and what many grads report as the most valuable thing they take from class.
IMPACT initially developed its training for adult women, seeking to combat the frightening statistic that one-in-three women will be the victim of sexual assault during her lifetime. But at least half of the women who took our class had already survived some type of assault. So we developed workshops for teen girls. When we again encountered a much-too-high incidence of assault in that age group, we developed a kids program for boys and girls, ages 6-12.
Students had endless “what if…?” questions—"What if I can’t see?" "What if he has a gun?" "What if I’m in a bed?" "What if my kids are with me?"—which resulted in experimentation and the addition of more classes to our rosters, such as the Advanced Course, Partners, Weapons Defense, and Multiple Assailants. But, we didn’t stop there…
In 2010, we became a 501(c)3 non-profit to provide our life-saving training to at-risk youth and financially disadvantaged women who cannot afford regular classes. We work with the LA Downtown Women’s Shelter regularly and, in 2013, added scholarship slots to all of our regular Basics courses, when funding is available.
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It takes someone special to be an IMPACT instructor, yet our instructors are ordinary everyday people. Teachers, executives, salespeople, scientists, and artists – all our instructors felt the need to give back.
All instructors work for us whenever they can and would like to. Most classes are on weekends, so for most of our staff, teaching for IMPACT is meaningful part-time work.
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One thing that makes IMPACT unique is “the suit.” Perhaps you’ve seen them on TV or at a local event.
Our padded instructors wear specially designed protective armor so that our students can strike full force and find out what it really takes to confront a larger person or to deliver a knockout blow to an aggressor. They are protected from head to toe, providing students with the unique opportunity to fight back using all of their strength and without hesitation.