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The Center for Anti-Violence Education (CAE) works as a catalyst for change in the lives of women, transgender people , teen women, children, and other
communities especially affected by violence. CAE’s programs are designed to develop participants’ skills, knowledge, and awareness to enable them to heal from, prevent, and counter violence. We do this work to actively create a peaceful, just, and equitable world.

Description:
CAE’s self-defense & marshal arts programs empower women, people of the LGBT community, and youth to heal from, prevent & counter violence. We offer courses in self-defense, karate, and tai chi for women, transgender people, teens and children. CAE’s courses for youth combine practical physical self-defense training, boundary-setting role playing (that helps to build assertiveness) and discussions highlighting major issues facing youth - including sexual abuse, violence in relationships, body image, how to be safe at school and in the street, and sexual harassment. Our programs encourage students to find their voices and to realize their own individual potential and their connections with their broader worlds. Always guided by a commitment to addressing the different types of oppression that lead to violence, CAE has long used trainings, discussions, and special programs to turn our anti-racist commitment into reality and to create a community organization that is truly accessible to people from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. Many of our students attend classes for free or almost-free. Sliding-scale fees and free child-care reflect our bedrock commitment to women, transgender people, teens, and children, families and individuals, of all socio-economic backgrounds.

History:
Started in 1974 as Brooklyn Women’s Martial Arts, CAE is one of the oldest women & LGBT martial arts schools in the nation, and the only women’s & LGBT school in NYC offering sliding fee scales and free childcare. In the late 1990s, CAE welcome women of transgender experience and since the fall of 2004, CAE’s courses are inclusive of all transgender individuals. We have refined our policy in hopes to determine the best way to reconcile our historic mission as a women’s organization and our commitment to being allies with the transgender community and to fighting gender oppression.
Over the past thirty years, we have offered community education workshops at schools, work places, rape crisis centers, domestic violence groups, HIV/AIDS organizations, youth agencies, community centers, substance abuse recovery organizations, and in a host of other settings. Over the next five years, CAE will expand our work to promote social change, fight oppression, broaden our work with children and teen women, increase our public education and training programs to better build community, and strengthen women, transgender people, and other communities especially affected by violence so that we confront the violence in our communities and work to create a world without violence.

Contact person: Administrator Cae, Volunteer Coordinator, (718) 788-1775, (email)

Address:

327 Seventh Street, 2nd floor Brooklyn, NY 11215 (See a map)

Directions:

CAE is at the corner of 7th Street and 5th Avenue in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, NY. We are on the 2nd floor of 327 7th Street (across the street from our former location). By Train: Take the F train. . . (more)   Nearest Metro/Subway Stop: 4th Ave , or 9th Street ,   Walk distance (in minutes): Under 5min.   Nearest Bus Stop: 7th, or 9th street & 5th Ave, or 5th Ave & 10th Street