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By NATHAN HOWELL | Staff Writer

ALABASTER – Battleground Martial Arts, Alabaster for Tomorrow and Cultivate Church are partnering to host three free community workshops to promote youth safety.

The workshops will be held on July 17, 24 and 31. They will cover the topics of youth safety, teen self-defense, bully awareness and youth drug prevention.

Battleground’s Troy Clayton said these workshops came as a partnership between the organizations to help prevent future substance abuse for children and teens.

“These workshops run hand-in-hand with Alabaster for Tomorrow’s drug prevention program,” Clayton said. “Most of your drug abuse in kids, teens and young adults stems from something that happened to them when they were younger. Not only can it lead to drug abuse, but it can also cause depression. This can be from bullying, sexual abuse, cyber abuse or anything like that.”

The first workshop on July 17 will focus on the topic of youth safety. Clayton explained this first seminar would provide resources and information for a younger audience on how to protect themselves and be aware of dangerous situations.

“We will have some videos for them to watch, workbooks with information for them to complete and safety cards,” Clayton said. “We also plan to go over and do some martial arts stuff for fun. The kids will get an opportunity to break boards.”

On July 24, the seminar will mostly be focused on safety for people going into college. Clayton said it would provide a number of resources, especially for young women who are often targets for abuse in college situations.

“We will work on safety prevention,” Clayton said. “We will talk about things like watching your drink when you are at parties and other common things that are used to target people like this.”

The final workshop on July 31 will be a bully awareness workshop.

Clayton said each of these classes will target areas that often lead younger people down a path toward drug abuse.

Alabaster for Tomorrow is an organization created in a partnership with Compact. The group works to provide information, programming and resources to help prevent substance abuse.

These workshops are free to the public. More information is available on the Battleground Martial Arts Facebook page.