The IMPACT Organization
IMPACT Chicago, founded in 1987, is a not-for-profit organization, governed by a volunteer Board of Directors. IMPACT Chicago is part of the national and international IMPACT community, which has yearly Director meetings and regular e-mail communications about teaching self-defense, maintaining high professional and ethical standards, doing outreach, and discussing other issues related to self-defense and organizational development. 

IMPACT Chicago offers experience-based self-defense and educational programs directed primarily to women in Chicago, IL, and the Great Lakes region. IMPACT programs are designed to build on the natural strengths that women possess, such as their intuition and the power in their hips and legs.  Our programs provide women with an opportunity to learn and practice prevention, assessment, verbal boundary setting, and physical self-defense skills in simulated scenarios with a padded attacker. The physical fighting skills women learn are skills of last resort, but many women report that learning to knock someone out opens up possibilities and confidence in making peaceful choices for dealing with violence as well as simultaneously enhancing freedom and safety. 

IMPACT Chicago’s programs are taught by highly trained instructors. Additional information about our instructors is available on our IMPACT Instructors page.

For additional information about IMPACT Chicago’s organization or mission, please call the IMPACT Chicago office (773-338-4545) or e-mail Martha Thompson (Martha@impactchicago.org), the IMPACT Chicago Coordinator.

IMPACT Works
Newspapers and television continually bombard us with stories and statistics that bespeak terror and fear:

•  Almost one-third of women in the workplace and 85% of girls in school report harassment (Louis Harris and Associates Poll, March 1994 and American Association of University Women, Hostile Hallways: AAUW Survey on Sexual Harassment in America's Schools, 1993).
• At some point in their lives, 25-31% of American women report being physically or sexually abused by a husband or boyfriend (The Commonwealth Fund, Health Concerns Across a Woman's Life Span: 1998 Survey of Women's Health, May 1999; The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and The National Institute of Justice, Extent, Nature, and Consequences of Intimate Partner Violence, July 2000).
• About one-fifth of American women report experiencing a completed or attempted rape at some time in their lives (The Commonwealth Fund, Health Concerns Across a Woman's Life Span: 1998 Survey of Women's Health, May 1999; The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and The National Institute of Justice, Prevalence, Incidence, and Consequences of Violence Against Women: Findings from the National Violence Against Women Survey, November 1998).

Fortunately, there is more to these stories. Women do fight back to protect themselves. 

• A woman who fights back gains an 86% chance of avoiding the rape and incurs little chance of additional injury. Most injuries occur before the woman starts fighting back. Women are most likely to stop an attack if they act immediately and use multiple strategies, such as yelling, fleeing, negotiating, or fighting (Kleck and Sayles, "Rape and Resistance," Social Problems 1990, 37:149-62; Bart & O'Brien, Stopping Rape, 1985).

• Women who have completed IMPACT/Model Mugging report increased ability to set boundaries, increased self-confidence, and greater freedom in their everyday lives (Ozer and Bandura, "Mechanisms Governing Empowerment Effects: A Self-Efficacy Analysis," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1990).
• Of women trained in self-defense with a padded attacker and who were attacked after the training, 56% knocked-out or disabled their attacker, 34% escaped from their attacker or he ran away, 6% lost property, and 4% submitted to a rape because in their judgment it was the safest choice (Mark Morris, unpublished study of 50 Model Mugging graduates).

IMPACT works.