Danville Teen Continues Mission To Train Students In Self-Defense

DANVILLE, CA — A Monte Vista High School freshman is continuing her mission to equip her fellow students with the skills they need to physically defend themselves.

In 2022, Sonia Sharma founded Project emPower, which provides training for teachers to teach their students self-defense skills. Over the summer, she paid $500 of her own money to hire an instructor from the national United Studios of Self-Defense to teach PE teachers from Dublin Unified School District and San Ramon Valley Unified School District how to incorporate self-defense lessons in their classes. With just 2.5 hours of training, Sharma says these teachers are now able to teach basic self-defense to 2500 students.

In February, she helped run a similar event for roughly 20 SRVUSD elementary school teachers, which means that about 10,000 more students will now have access to self-defense skills. This time around, the school district covered half the cost of the roughly $600 training. Sharma is continuing to speak to leaders in Walnut Creek to implement another training there.

She is also continuing her work to create a proposal for a state bill to provide funding across the state to train PE teachers in self-defense. She is gathering letters of support, often from teachers who have participated in the training, as part of a proposal that she plans to send to the office of Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan around August.

Sharma is also planning an event in the fall to train 100 school girls in India in self-defense. “My mom used to tutor the girls there in English, and I started talking to the founders, because I would be on the Zoom calls sometimes, and while we were talking, we would talk a little bit about my project, and they seemed really interested,” she said.