Tammy Yard-McCracken is a psychotherapist, Krav Maga instructor, and founder of 500 Rising, a nonprofit that trains instructors and runs women’s and girls’ self-defense programs in North America and Europe. She founded Kore Self-Defense and Krav Maga in Northern Virginia, has taught with the Violence Dynamics instructor group, and works on conflict communication, scenario training, and instructor development.
The second part of our talk with Q&A from my Patrons is here
Summary
Wim and Tammy pick up about three years after their last talk. She describes handing Kore Self-Defense and Krav Maga to her instructor team when the lease ended so she could stop splitting bandwidth between the school and 500 Rising. The nonprofit now fields training requests in the US, UK, and Europe, with early conversations about Zambia and Australia. Next steps she names are short online courses for instructors and the public, a larger US board of directors, tying that board to the European advisory council, and moving herself out of the de facto CEO role so the work is not personality-driven.
They then work through the resistance 500 Rising draws: the claim that men and women have identical personal-safety needs, the claim that women cannot defend themselves so training is pointless, and the “what about men” demand that is rarely followed by anyone building a men’s program. Tammy separates a few openly misogynistic comments from people picking a fight and from people whose core beliefs are being violated. Wim and Tammy argue over ego and outdated studies, the difference between jealousy and envy, accountability when an instructor is wrong on the mat, why strangulation stats look different for women than for men, and whether MeToo-era boundary management is revenge or a new workplace rule men are still learning.
Key takeaways
- Tammy’s stated goal for 500 Rising is to make the curriculum outlast her. Training directors already deliver the courses. She wants the US board expanded and someone else in the top leadership seat so the organization does not vanish if the founder does.
- Most online hostility she sees is not hard misogyny. A larger share is people looking for a rise. Another subset is reacting because women’s self-defense contradicts a belief they have built identity around. New data that kills an old teaching point hits that same nerve.
- Specialization is treated as exclusion. 500 Rising trains women and still lets men into the instructor courses. When critics ask where the men’s self-defense class is, Tammy’s reply has been: put one on. That offer has produced crickets.
- Crime figures are a snapshot, not a verdict. Definitions change, reporting collapses when police do not act, and sexual-violence reporting in the US data they use is roughly 10 percent men and 90 percent women, with male cases known to be under-reported. Talking about one pattern does not make the other pattern disappear.
- On the mat, unacknowledged errors break rapport and stop students from asking hard questions. Tammy uses the choke-versus-strangle example: a male instructor can be statistically right that strangulation is rare for men and still wrong for the women in the same room.
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