Today we’d like to introduce you to Lissette Delgado-Fitzgerald.
Hi Lissette, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstories with our readers?
We started our Empowerment Self Defense journey in 2003 while living in Miami, Florida. Our oldest son was in middle school, a quirky, thin 6th grader who got jumped and robbed by 4 big upperclassmen. That started our ride through the ins and outs of the reality about self-defense programs, the justice system, and trauma-informed teaching.
As a result of those experiences, we created the ASSERT Empowerment Self Defense program, which we went on to implement in universities, K-12 schools, in-patient eating disorder treatment clinics, halfway houses, domestic violence shelters, foster care transitional homes and organizations, and so many other nonprofits, social groups, schools, and families.
We’ve been teaching the program since 2004 and launched here in Nashville in 2013.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
The first obstacle was research. Every organization, from governmental to nonprofit to medical, had a distinct set of statistics about crime, victimization, and application of justice. It took us a while to understand where the wildly different numbers for a particular type of crime came from. Turns out that it was all definitions, with the most egregious issues coming from local, county, and state government crime stats. Once we were able to decipher those, and compare apples to apples, it became a lot easier to create a program that addressed traumatic victimization in a more focused and effective way, grounded in the reality of threats and the likelihood of experiencing them.
It was a very different time, trying to find this information in 2003/04. Now, the public has better access to this kind of information, though the institutional issues remain.
The next was getting the word out about the program and what made us different.
So many self-defense programs are female-only and fear-based, essentially telling the women attending them that they were responsible for the actions of their attacker and should curb their lives to make them small and be unnoticeable. They also created a sense of distrust of everyone while focusing on all of the wrong issues. They weren’t about offering safe spaces for women to train, rather creating spaces in which women were taught to fear everyone and everything.
The few that were not gender-specific were martial arts-based marketing programs designed to get attendees to sign up for ongoing classes, rather than provide effective, immediately applicable techniques for safety. The competition was hard, especially because of media sensationalization of self-defense techniques. Later, as gun culture has risen in prevalence, the competition turned to the idea that “I have a gun, it will protect me.”
That is one of the biggest self-defense fallacies out there. Weapons, pepper spray, firearms, none of them will defend you. You defend yourself. If you expect to use something to assist you, you have to train for its use with carefully planned and supervised scenario-based training and refresh that training regularly.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
We are a female-led and minority-run. ASSERT Empowerment Self Defense is a 501(c)3 organization dedicated to ending Gender-, Race-, Sexual-, and Ethnic-based violence and discrimination, amplifying minority voices into positions of influence, and boosting gender, racial, and ethnic equity in arenas in which their perspectives are crucial yet seldom heard or considered necessary, all through gender-inclusive, culturally relevant Empowerment Self Defense (ESD) Education for all.
We achieve this by creating a network of community-based ASSERT Empowerment Self Defense Instructors, within marginalized and underserved communities, that promotes and offers jobs and careers in ESD, providing continuing education for ESD Instructors and others in related fields, promoting and supporting ESD Instructors and Program Grads in entering and actively seeking positions of leadership locally and beyond, and creating and supporting a platform in which members of those communities can become and be recognized as experts in their safety, security, and advancement.
Our Vision for the World
We believe in s a future of empathy, empowerment, and engagement from and for people everywhere.
Our Mission
Empowering women, BIPOC, LGBTQ+, & members of marginalized communities to develop and hold healthy relationships, work to end gender, sexual, and race-based violence, and become influencers and leaders in spaces affecting their health and safety but which have silenced and ignored their voices.
Our Values
We Believe:
*The Pioneering Spirit is rooted in the belief that we are free to succeed and that it is safe to fail, get up, and try again.
*Empowerment, tempered by Empathy, is the key to ending the abuse and insecurity intrinsic in Predator Culture.
*That a world where everyone feels safe and confident in living healthy, free, bold, connected lives is possible within our lifetime.
*We all carry a dictionary with vocabulary learned through the lens of our personal experience. We must also carry 7.5 billion Thesauri if we expect to communicate effectively and honor those around us.
What sort of changes are you expecting over the next 5-10 years?
As the world awakens increasingly to the realities of intersectional disadvantages, the Empowerment Self Defense industry grows and develops better techniques for teaching and training in trauma-informed safe spaces. Also, more studies are being done about bottom-up trauma treatments, which is the space in which ESD works. And, as more organizations are exposed to the work that we do, I strongly believe that it will become the standard for Self-Defense training, a primary source for violence prevention education, and a key tool in healing and recovery after traumatic events of all kinds.
Contact Info:
- Email: info@YouCanBeAssertive.com
- Website: www.YouCanBeAssertive.com
- Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/youcanbeassertive
- Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/youcanbeassertive
