Public Speaking Presentations & Handouts
Child Abuse in America
To provide the audience with increased awareness of the individual, familial, community, societal, and political realities of child abuse in America, and to inspire them to do their part to combat the epidemic.
Child Abuse in America Lecture Handout
Trauma, Dissociation, and Recovery
To provide the audience with a survivor’s perspective on what is required of a therapist working with survivors and multiples.
Understanding Multiple Personality (DID Q&A)
To provide the audience with an opportunity to explore the mind and life of an actual multiple in order to promote greater understanding of multiplicity (etiology and realities) from a first-person plural perspective.
Bodywork / Massage: A Survivor’s Perspective
To provide the audience with awareness (or increased awareness) of the crucial importance of bodywork to survivors’ healing processes, as well as some significant issues pertinent to doing bodywork on survivors.
About BTS Spokesperson / Public Speaker
Dakota M Draconi earned a Master’s in Social Work with Distinction from Fresno State in 2012, at which time Dakota also received the Student Affairs Graduate Dean’s Medal. In 2008, Dakota earned a Bachelor of Arts in Women’s Studies from Fresno State. Dakota has been a professional public speaker since 1999, with a powerful message that has reached more than 10,000 people.
Dakota is a member of the National Coalition Building Institute International Fresno State Affiliate Team and a Certified Domestic Violence Crisis Counselor through Marjaree Mason Center in Fresno. Dakota works at Fresno State as a lecturer for the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department and the Department of Social Work Education.
Dakota lives in Central California with a spouse, three sons, a husky/malamute, and a terrier mix (grand doggy). Dakota enjoys running; writing, speaking, and teaching; rallying for social justice; hanging out with friends; playing cards, tabletop, or video games with the family; binging Netflix shows; and doing home improvement therapy.
Dakota is a trauma survivor and a true warrior. Through Dakota’s own experiences, as well as extensive education in the field, Dakota has an undeniably profound passion for raising community awareness, with the primary goals of both preventing further child abuse as well as facilitating the empowerment of child abuse survivors. Dakota’s dream is an end to all violence against the most vulnerable among us: Our Children.