Dear Friend,
In 1981, I was running Karate Women School of Movement and Martial Arts when LACAAW found me and asked me to help train their self defense instructors as a volunteer. In 1983, I joined as a full time staff member as the self defense program manager and training coordinator and in 1985 became the Executive Director! So many years later, I am still here working on my lifelong passion of ending violence against women and all humans in our world.
The 1980s saw tremendous much growth for LACAAW. Community need and response grew as awareness of services spread. Funding increased and we were able to also expand our service area and programming. We continued with our self defense program and started incorporating self defense instructor trainings allowing us to reach more people. We introduced child sexual assault prevention programming into our offerings. We launched our culturally specific Latina Services program, serving the large population of monolingual Spanish speaking individuals and families across LA County. We expanded our volunteer advocate training. And in 1988 at the request of the Deaf community, we introduced our one of a kind Deaf Services program. We became the first sexual and domestic violence agency to have a dedicated Deaf Services program.
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