In this promotional video, Mike Domitrz, founder of the Date Safe Project and creator of the "Can I Kiss You?" program, explains the need for an accessible, online training solution for professionals working to reduce sexual violence, teach consent, and foster respect. He highlights the scarcity of practical, engagement‑focused training that can be delivered remotely, noting that existing options often require costly travel to live workshops. To address this gap, Domitrz introduces the "Education Through Engagement" online course, which provides instant, 24/7 access to all lessons without waiting for weekly releases. The curriculum draws on his two‑decades of experience across the U.S. military, K‑12 schools, universities, corporations, and international audiences, and includes a blend of recorded live workshops, one‑on‑one video lessons, and interactive components. Core modules cover handling hecklers, using appropriate humor, responding to victim‑blaming statements, and surveying program effectiveness. The course is designed to be adaptable to any trainer’s personality and the specific demographics they serve, offering practical skill‑sets for diverse room sizes and cultural contexts. Learners can ask questions via video comments or email, ensuring ongoing support. Domitrz emphasizes that the course delivers the same high‑quality material as his in‑person "Education Through Engagement" workshops, but with the flexibility of an online format.
Chapters
When you're dedicated on working to reduce sexual violence and teach respect and teach consent, you know one of the things that you discover early on in this work is that while there's a lot of research out there to grab and use, and there's a lot of program approaches that are out there, and you can find all of these at conferences, There is very little where you can learn how to actually engage people in these conversations, where you get specific skill sets on what to do with a room of different sizes and different groups and demographics and different technologies you can use to integrate and work with people in the room. There's almost nothing. And then when you do find it, it tends to be a live workshop you have to drive to or fly to, and that can be impossible to make happen logistically. And I understand that because as a former Yeah. So, when I founded the Date Safe Project, we host those events because some people want to go to those live events, but a lot of times people are like, Mike, we just can't make the dates, or, hey, we're given no budget for travel, so we're just not allowed to go, or, we're in this part of the world and we're not able to get there. Whatever the cause is, there's many reasons that are legitimate for not being able to participate in those learning experiences. So, this online course has been created just for you. You don't need to go anywhere. You get to learn right there on your computer or whatever device you want to use to get access to the course. It's available to you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. And here's the really cool part. Once you register to join the class, you are in. You have full access to all the lessons instantaneously. What that means is you do not have to wait. If you get in, you don't have to think, oh, week 1 I get this lesson, and then week 2 I get that lesson. And you're sitting there going, well, I want to dive into this. Where's week 3? I don't want to wait. You don't have to. You get all the lessons immediately for as long a period of time as you choose to register for. So that's the coolest part about this course. You get everything. And then the other part that's really important, if you've been doing this work long enough, you know one of the things that tends to happen is people will run out there— training companies right now are rushing out because they think this is a hot topic they're suddenly interested in and providing lots of training opportunities for people who care about working to reduce sexual violence, teach consent, teach respect. The problem is those training companies and/or individuals almost have zero experience specific to this topic, actually conducting trainings with a diverse group of audiences throughout their career. And so what you get is you're getting training that doesn't really, really, really apply To the group you work with because the person you're learning from hasn't been doing this long enough or hasn't done enough trainings themselves to have a diverse background on how to really teach this for all kinds of audiences. That's a problem. And that's what drove us to create this because we're like, look, we need to create something that people can rely on. I've been fortunate in that I've been able to work for over 2 decades on working to reduce sexual violence, teaching consent and respect. I've been working with the U.S. military. I work with middle schools, high schools, universities throughout North America, organizations and corporations. If you can think of a demographic or a type of person that you think would be difficult to work with on this topic, I've worked with that person. And so, I get a vibe for what— and by the way, that doesn't mean that person's trying to be difficult at all. That's one of the things you learn in this. They're genuinely trying to understand. They're coming from an analytical viewpoint. That sometimes for those of us in the field can be hard to understand because it just seems cold or mean or it doesn't seem compassionate. So you have to have skill sets on being able to handle those difficult moments. And we're going to give you all of that in this course. I'm going to hold nothing back. Now, if you don't know about who I am, and that's cool, right? I mean, I'm no celebrity, but you might be wondering, Mike, who are you? What is your experience? Well, you heard me just say I've been doing this for over 2 decades. I founded the Date Safe Project about 10 years into my career, and that has been existing now for over 15 years. And at the Date Safe Project, we created a program called Can I Kiss You? And that's a program that I've done all over the world hundreds of times a year. So on a given year for me, typically I'm going to give 200 to 250 trainings and/or presentations around the world. That's just on an average year. I'll speak to tens of thousands within that year. It could be 30,000, it could be 60,000, depending on whether there's 200 people in an audience or 2,000 people in an audience. So it'll really vary. That's good because that means I've worked with groups as small as 5 to 10 people in a room, and I've worked with groups as large as 6,000 people in my audience. So I'm able to give you a wide variety in what works and what doesn't work When it comes to that. So that's my background. I'm in— still today, I'm the founder of the Date Safe Project. I'm still actively out there speaking. So the reason I bring that up is sometimes what you'll find is people go out and speak a bunch, speak a bunch, stop speaking and go, okay, now I'm just going to train. Well, the problem is they're not actively doing that currently and they don't do it a lot, so they're not hearing what's changing and what's coming at people Currently, where I am, because literally, like next week's a great example, I'm not home at all because I'm out, right? The week after that, almost every day Monday through Friday, I'm in a different location giving trainings. That's very common. So that gives you an idea of where I'm coming from, and I love being able to share this and have this discussion because in doing this work, I've been to a lot of trainings where We all, many of us have, where you're sitting in and it's almost painful to listen to. And I don't blame the person conducting the training at all because no one gave this person training. Nobody gave them the skill sets. And that's what you need to do to really be effective. We need to constantly be learning. So what did I do? I didn't just go out there and do this for the past 2 decades. I went out and I learned from the best speakers in the world. I became very active in the speaking industry so I could go see what the best people were doing on stage, not so that I could ever learn their material or take what they were doing, but to see how they approached being able to engage with an audience, how they approached being able to handle different situations, and then find how that works with my personality. And that's going to be a key to everything you're going to learn in this online course. You're going to be able to customize it to your personality. The last thing anybody should be thinking is, hey, Mike Domitrz is doing this online course so everybody can learn how to train like Mike Domitrz trains. No, no, no, no, no, no. I'm going to be me. You're going to be you. And so everything that I'm going to teach, you can adapt to you, to fit your personality, how you train, how you speak. How you deeply are passionate about working to reduce sexual violence, about teaching respect, about teaching consent in your own way. To give you a little vibe here of some of the lessons that we're going to teach in this course, they're going to include handling the heckler. Now you might be going, Mike, what do you mean by the heckler? That person who's in the room who feels like they are just in there to challenge you.
So everybody in the crowd is seeing this turd ask the same question 4 or 5 different ways. So now we're like, why is this guy here?
I'm gonna give you a very specific 5 steps to take that can help you address that moment in the moment and actually turn it into a beautiful learning experience for everyone in the room. That's gonna be in the handling The heckler portion. We're going to do another section on integrating humor, right? Because when you can get people laughing, their barriers go down dramatically. They're in a safer space to be able to learn, to be able to open up and have honest conversations. They're making like fart noises? Yes, yes! Ah, they all relate, they're laughing! Okay, so now, so how do you work that in? Learn to be able to open up and have honest conversations and using appropriate humor, because on this topic, the wrong kind of humor could do harm. Hey, what about those victim-blaming statements that you hear if you do enough trainings? If you've been doing this long enough, you know what I'm talking about. If you're brand new to this, it can be incredibly overwhelming when somebody in the room says something that could do a lot of harm or can clearly be inappropriate, especially considering what you're discussing. How do you respond to that? Well, we have a lesson in here that goes in-depth on the 32 most common forms of victim blaming, and you're literally going to see me act out the victim blaming statement and then respond how you, a trainer, could respond if that happened in front of you. This is the kind of in-depth detail we're talking about in these lessons. And you're going to get to be able to experience this from 2 different perspectives. Some of the lessons is going to be one-on-one like this here at the Date Safe Project's Online Training Center. I'm talking to you. A lot of them are going to be you being able to actually watch an Education Through Engagement live workshop. Remember how we said a lot of people are like, hey, I can't get to the live one, but I want to experience that energy of being around others? So what we did is we filmed a live Education Through Engagement workshop, intimate setting, 30 people coming from all over the world. People in this room were from all levels of K-12 education, universities, a lot of military from all over the world were in this group of 30. And you'll get to literally sit in on that video of those live sessions that we recorded. So when everyone's laughing, you'll be able to laugh with them. So there's gonna be a lot of variety here, whether you watch a training, the live training like that, or whether I'm talking to you one-on-one. The majority provide the live training, so you get to be in that experience. But we knew some of these were better for us to have these one-on-one conversations, so we designed it that way for you. So you get the best of all worlds. And in the end, that's what this is all about. This is about getting you a ton of options, a ton of skill sets that you can handpick what works for you to make your training that much more effective, that much more powerful. One of our lessons, we're going to teach you how to be able to survey the room to prove the effectiveness of your program so that they keep bringing you back to give the program, right, to give the training. That can be priceless. All of this is in the course. I'm so excited. And by the way, you're wondering, why Mike Education Through Engagement? Well, that is what we call the live training. It's called Education Through Engagement. We conduct these around the world, and that's exactly what you're getting— the material that you would get if you came to my live program. So we kept the name the same because that is what you're experiencing. You're just getting the online version, which means you have it available to you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to fit your schedule and your needs. I can't wait to see you in this course participating because when you're in the course, at every video lesson, you can leave questions at the bottom, right? So you can engage with us. You can email us. We have a way that you can do that. Once you're in, you'll find out how you can email us questions. So I can't wait to see you in the course of Education Through Engagement.
