We Keep Us Safe

Trauma-Informed Self-Defense + Jiu-Jitsu

Part of the Solar Punk Town Hall series

We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We don’t build safer communities by waiting for someone else to come save us. We build them by learning skills, building trust, knowing our own capacity, and looking out for one another.

Join us for a trauma-informed self-defense and jiu-jitsu workshop designed for women, femmes, and nonbinary folks. We’ll learn practical skills around awareness, boundaries, leverage, escape, and creating opportunities to get to safety.

The workshop will also include a short introduction to parkour and movement with Lucas, exploring how we can develop greater awareness of our bodies and surroundings, interact with our environment, and build confidence in our ability to move through the world.

No previous martial arts, self-defense, or parkour experience is necessary. This is a skills-based workshop, not a fitness class. Movement will be approached with an emphasis on accessibility, choice, and individual capacity, and there is no expectation that you disclose personal experiences or participate in anything that feels outside your boundaries.

We’ll center consent, choice, accessibility, and nervous-system awareness throughout the class. You are always in control of your participation, including taking a break, modifying an exercise, or opting out.

Meet Your Facilitators

Makayla is a trauma-informed jiu-jitsu coach and an all-around incredible human. She is traveling all the way from Palm Desert, California to share these skills with our community.

Her work is rooted in helping people develop calm, clarity, self-trust, and a stronger connection to their own bodies. As a coach, she brings a compassionate, nervous-system-aware approach to her work, creating space for people to build confidence without being pushed past their boundaries.

For this workshop, Makayla brings that same trauma-informed philosophy to self-defense and jiu-jitsu: practical skills, agency, consent, and the understanding that you are the person who gets to decide what happens with your body.

Lucas is a parkour coach, movement educator, and community organizer whose work sits at the intersection of physical practice and collective care. He has spent years supporting young people in building confidence, resilience, and a sense of agency through movement, including developing adaptive parkour and gymnastics programming for children with disabilities and special needs.

His approach is rooted in patience, creativity, and a deep respect for each person's capacity to grow. For this workshop, he'll lead an introduction to movement and parkour, helping us explore body awareness, environmental awareness, adaptability, and the confidence that comes from discovering what we're capable of.

Makayla and Lucas have shared a deep friendship spanning more than a decade, and we're so excited to bring the trust, care, and shared perspective they've built over the years into this workshop. Together, they bring two different but deeply connected approaches to the same idea: knowing your body, knowing your options, and building the capacity to take care of yourself and each other.

The body is part of the toolkit.

This workshop is part of the Solar Punk Town Hall series, exploring the skills, relationships, and collective practices we need to build the communities we actually want to live in.

Come learn. Come practice. Come build capacity with us.

A limited amount of sliding scale tickets are available for this event. Please reach out via our website contact form to discuss options!

Learn more about Makayla: Coaching with Makayla