History

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.

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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.

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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…

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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.