NO MEANS NO WORLDWIDE was founded by Lee Sinclair, a writer/activist living in San Francisco. In 2001 she and her husband Dr. Jake Sinclair had been coordinating a child care and sponsorship program for AIDS orphans in Kenya through their non profit organization Manasseh’s Children. It was her experiences with these vulnerable children and their stories of rape, incest and sexual abuse that led Lee to realize that her own Self-Defense training could be lifesaving when applied to children living in the area.

Step 1 – WOMEN’S SAFETY PROJECT In 1993 Ms. Sinclair took her first 10 week self defense class from instructors Susannah MacKaye and Ziadee Whiptail  at The Women’s Safety Project in San Francisco. 10 years later Lee extracted strategies from those classes to train small groups of local Kenyan children. The need however far exceeded her ability and a larger effort was organized

Step 2 – DOLPHIN
In October 2005, Lee contacted a rape prevention group from Eldoret Kenya and hired them to come and teach the first year round Self-Defense classes in Nairobi. This team, called “Dolphin Anti-Rape AIDS Control Outreach”, taught basic Self-Defense strategies and situational skills to over 100,000 school children. It was Lee’s involvement with Dolphin that highlighted the need for an expanded, more comprehensive approach to addressing rape, AIDS and Gender-Based Violence (GBV).

Step 3- I’M WORTH DEFENDING KENYA
In February 2007, with the help of  WSP instructors, Susannah MacKaye and Wendi Deetz, Lee created a rape prevention organization called I’M WORTH DEFENDING. IWDKenya is the first slum based, full time, year round self defense team in the world. After a month of specialized training, the 4 men and 4 women of IWDK team began teaching their first classes. Since then the group had brought this vital training to over 60,000 women and children.

Step 4 – NO MEANS NO WORLDWIDE/USA
NMNW is the next phase in the quest to promote and implement sustainable global self defense practices. We proved the efficacy of using direct action self defense strategies large scale in the slums – but what about the rest of the world? Ms. Sinclair receives requests for self defense services from around the globe. Responding to those requests with practical, effective SD training franchises is the greater vision of NO MEANS NO WORLDWIDE.