We help conflict-affected communities develop independent, sustainable programs of personal safety and leadership.
We equip women and girls in conflict-affected communities with personal safety skills, confidence, and leadership capability. Our model invests in the community — each deployment identifies and develops local coaches who can continue training safely, culturally, and sustainably after the visiting team leaves.
Who We Are
The Safety and Leadership Alliance is a nonprofit born from a conviction that self-defense is not just a physical skill. It is a reclamation of dignity, agency, and hope. We arrive not to deliver a program and leave, but to ignite lasting, sustainable change in the world's most vulnerable communities.
Declaration of Intent
We believe that every woman and girl deserves the tools to protect herself, the confidence to lead, and a community that sustains those capabilities without outside help.
We do this by training and certifying local women as coaches, and investing materially in building a training infrastructure and facility.
How It Started
In the summer of 2018, a small team of self-defense instructors traveled to a refugee camp in Northern Iraq — home to 15,000 Yazidi internally displaced persons — to teach self-defense to women and girls who had survived unimaginable atrocities at the hands of ISIS. On the first day, 20 students showed up. By the third day, 90.
"I feel powerful. The main reason why I want to learn is for the future. If someone wants to enter inside my tent with a knife to kill us, we can defend ourselves."
17-year-old Yazidi survivor, Northern Iraq, 2018Our Objectives
Get Involved
Your support funds training missions, instructor travel, and the certification of local coaches who keep the work alive after we leave.
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