IMPACT Safety: An Overview

IMPACT Safety, is a nonprofit organization established in 1993.

Our mission: Building safety from the inside out. We teach people of all ages and abilities the critical emotional and physical skills necessary to reduce risk, prevent violence, make safe choices, and live and work with greater confidence.

IMPACT Safety Today

IMPACT Safety teaches practical skills to enhance personal safety and confidence for adults, youth, individuals with special needs, organizations and corporations in Central Ohio and around the state. Women, teens, children, and men can learn these effective strategies that prevent violence. Organizations can help their employees enhance their sense of safety and confidence in the face of risk through safety awareness courses and workshops.

IMPACT Safety teaches the following life skills:

• Deterring potential assailants
• Reading nonverbal communication
• Protecting personal boundaries
• De-escalation tactics
• Emotional Control
• Physical skills if necessary
• To communicate effectively in confrontation.
• To say “no” clearly.
• To sharpen instincts.
• To recognize the warnings signs of danger.
• To use emotions, including fear, to keep safe.
• To utilize “muscle memory”

What Makes IMPACT Different?

IMPACT Safety is a nationally recognized, not-for-profit organization based on the tenets of personal safety. IMPACT Safety employs a differentiated strategy of building individuals’ physical safety in conjunction with individuals’ emotional safety. IMPACT programs are unique in their methodology.

To this end, IMPACT has evolved on a different plane than has its perceived “competition,” which are primarily programs that focus on techniques of self defense. Most of the other programs (with which IMPACT is frequently categorized) take a reactive approach.

IMPACT is proactive. IMPACT sees traditional self-defense as an option of last resort. While it is vital for individuals to make appropriate choices in threatening situations, it is equally if not more important for individuals to learn how to avoid and/or recognize a potentially threatening situation before it unfolds. Hence the age-old saying: “An ounce of prevention beats a pound of cure.”

IMPACT views this approach as incomplete. Let’s face it: when one is assaulted, the damage is not just physical—it is emotional and psychological. The body works as a whole unit—physical, emotional and psychological. Preparing one part of the self (the physical) without effectively preparing the other parts (emotional and psychological) can become, with all good intentions set aside, a recipe for disaster. This is why IMPACT focuses on “state-dependent” learning. This allows participants to emotionally experience what it is like to be confronted or assaulted. This is accomplished by re-creating realistic scenarios that elicit fear, anger, frustration or any other emotion that would occur in an actual confrontation or assault.

By teaching individuals to experience this anxiety, and fear, they become more effectively trained in how they can respond in a potentially threatening situation. After all, most of us have no idea how we would respond until confronted with such a situation head-on, which we hope never happens. This is just one example of the IMPACT difference.

The core outcome of all IMPACT programs, regardless of population served, age of participants, or length of program duration is that participants leave with an increased sense of both physical and emotional personal boundaries. Individuals benefit from a deepened understanding of these boundaries and from the choices available to them should their boundaries be crossed.