Girls with G.R.I.T.

The San Juan Sheriff's Office is leading a program that is empowering women with essential skills and safety awareness, Girls with G.R.I.T., a program designed to equip women with essential skills while fostering invaluable connections between law enforcement and the community. You're watching the Local News Network brought to you by the Farmington Chamber of Commerce. I'm Sadie Smith. The program focuses on providing women in the community with the education and training to increase personal safety awareness.

G.R.I.T. is a program that the San Juan County Sheriff's Office developed to help empower women and it stands for guts, resilience, intuition and tenacity.

The classes are taught Tuesday evenings by San Juan Sheriff's Office employees who are considered experts on the subjects.

So each week is a different subject and we start out with all of our equipment the first night. Then we do detectives and then we cover internet crimes against children and showing citizens how to better protect their loved ones and their teenage kids that start to get cell phones, how they can lock down the cell phones. Then we go into the narcotics and talk about current trends in narcotics and then we have domestic violence one night and then we go into the firearms section and we have a couple of nights of that to get full acclimation so that those that have never fired a gun before get used to that. Then we have the defensive tactics and then we have a graduation night.

The program is provided to empower women in the community with the goal of educating women to be aware of criminal activity and how to prepare and prevent becoming a victim of a crime. The classes provide women with the confidence and knowledge on how to better protect themselves.

Confidence gained by our attendees is huge because they are more aware, they're able to recognize threats around them and have a plan to address that threat. And so the confidence gained by the students has absolutely been one of the great values that gets reported back to us.

G.R.I.T. was created as a way for the San Juan Sheriff's Department to give back to the community and it serves as a platform to strengthen ties between law enforcement and the citizens, fostering mutual understanding and exposure between deputies and the community.

This program is specifically tailored for women, for their protection, to give them usable techniques to use in their everyday lives to be safer in their community.

The 10 Week program is offered twice a year, once in the spring from March through May, and once in the fall from September through November. The program is popular and there's currently a wait list for the course. The signup form can be found online at the Sheriff's Department's website. For more information about this and other stories, visit farmingtonlocal.news. Thank you for watching this edition of "Community Insights." I'm Sadie Smith.