Founder Awareity
Founder/CEO First Preventers
Author, The First Preventers Playbook
Rick Shaw founded Awareity in 2004 and is the CEO. Rick also founded First Preventers, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, in 2019. Rick is a Pre-Incident Prevention Expert, author of The First Preventers Playbook, and Prevention Coach to leaders of schools, universities, organizations, and communities.
Rick’s passion is identifying innovative ways of preventing incidents before they occur. This passion for pre-incident prevention helped Rick take a different path when he began conducting extensive research of hundreds and hundreds of post-incident reports since the Columbine School Massacre in 1999. Rather than looking for a profile of the attackers (which most reports have found does not exist), Rick was looking for the Profile of the Failed Preventions, and while other experts had already identified a Pathway to Violence, Rick was identifying the Pathway to Prevention.
Utilizing research data from 20+ years of post-incident reports, Rick continues to identify lessons learned that must become lessons implemented to make schools, universities, organizations, and communities safer. Rick’s research led to developing the First Preventers Program and the First Preventers software platform of tools critically needed to better equip resources in schools, organizations, communities and beyond, especially threat assessment, threat management, and behavioral experts, to collect, funnel, and connect the dots to see the bigger picture to intervene, disrupt, and prevent at-risk individuals from escalating towards more incidents and tragedies before they occur. First Preventers and Pre-Incident Prevention are vital to saving lives, preventing costs, reducing liabilities, and mitigating soaring consequences with incident response and incident recovery.
Rick Shaw is a pre-incident prevention expert and his visionary prevention innovations have been recognized with the Risk Innovator award from Risk & Insurance Magazine, Responsibility Leader award from Liberty Mutual, Business Innovation award from Business Insurance, Campus Safety BEST Award from Campus Safety Magazine, and MVP Award from Security Sales & Integration Magazine for the top Central Station/Monitoring Platform.
Rick’s book – The First Preventers Playbook: How to Intervene, Disrupt, and Prevent Tragedy Before It Strikes – shares game-changing findings from his research, the 6 Stages of Prevention, the value of Return on Prevention, and the innovative First Preventers Program that radically simplifies pre-incident prevention and community safety.
