CJSF member Sonia Sharma contributes to her community with Project emPower.
September 3, 2022 | The Independent News
The Dublin Unified School District offered physical-education teachers basic self-defense workshops this summer, with the goal of eventually incorporating the instruction into the district’s curriculum.
The workshops were designed to provide physical education teachers with the necessary skills to teach basic self-defense to students to ensure that students in Dublin can defend themselves should the need ever arise. The workshops were inspired by Project emPower, an initiative started by Sonia Sharma, a Girl Scout in Danville and a member of the California Junior Scholarship Federation (CJSF), to encourage self-defense classes for girls in rural India who face physical violence, including a GoFundMe page.
Sharma, 14, has been working on Project emPower for more than a year and helped organize the workshops for the Dublin teachers. The Danville Recreation, Arts and Community Services Department has also adapted the ‘train the trainer’ model developed by Sharma for an after-school program at Diablo Vista Middle School.
