How Protect Prevent Empower- PPE Kids uses and plans to use print and direct mail:
Protect Prevent Empower- PPE Kids is a national nonprofit working to prevent child sexual abuse and child sexual abuse material (CSAM). We train the adults who care for children (teachers, child care staff, parents, coaches and youth leaders) to spot grooming early and act before a child is harmed. We also give children simple, age-appropriate words and tools to keep themselves safe.
We were founded in 2024 in Tazewell County, Virginia. Today we are an all-volunteer team, and our founders cover our operating costs themselves. That means every dollar we save on printing goes straight back into protecting kids.
Print matters for us because prevention only works when the message reaches people where they are. Many of the families we serve live in rural Appalachian communities with limited internet. Many of the caregivers we train are busy child care workers who will never sit through a webinar on their own time. A handout on a classroom wall, a coloring book on a kitchen table or a mailer in a director’s inbox does what a link cannot. It stays in the room.
A print grant would help us produce three things:
1. Training handouts and guides. Our Behind the Smile® training and our Grooming Awareness trainings (for children ages 3 to 7 and ages 13 to 17) each come with teacher and parent guides. We are building separate tracks for neurodivergent children, because they face higher risk and are too often left out of safety education. Printed guides let a teacher keep the warning signs at her desk. They let a parent work through the conversation at home, at their own pace. Our pay-what-you-can program gives organizations with budgets under $200,000 a 50% to 65% discount, so printed materials have to be affordable for us to give away.
2. Lumi coloring books. Lumi is our child-friendly character who teaches kids body safety and “safe adult” skills in a gentle, non-scary way. Our first book, the Lumi Captain coloring book, turns those lessons into pages children color, keep and talk about with a grown-up. Coloring is calming and familiar. It works for young children and for neurodivergent and non-verbal children who learn better through pictures than words. We plan to hand these out at trainings, in child care centers and at community events, so every trained classroom sends something home.
3. Outreach mailers. We are reaching out to child advocacy centers, child care centers, schools, churches and youth organizations across Southwest Virginia and beyond. A well-designed mailer introduces our free and low-cost trainings to directors who are hard to reach by email. We also plan to use direct mail in our year-end giving campaign, to thank and grow our first circle of individual donors.
Every printed piece will carry our new brand, our website and a clear next step: book a training, download a guide or talk to a safe adult. We will track how many pieces go out, where they go, and how many trainings and inquiries follow, so we can report back on what the grant made possible.
Child sexual abuse is preventable. But prevention depends on adults recognizing the signs and children having the words to speak up. A print grant from Telepathic Graphics would put those signs and words into thousands of hands: on classroom walls, in diaper bags and on refrigerator doors. That is where they will protect children.
Thank you for considering Protect Prevent Empower- PPE Kids.
