Founder & CEO, KICKS Group
David Giovenco
Founder, educator and advocate, building programs that turn lived experience into real change for the people who need it most.
David Giovenco built KICKS Empowered on a simple conviction: that the people furthest from work are rarely held back by a lack of advice. They’re held back by what life has done to their belief in themselves. His work is about rebuilding that belief, and doing it where it counts.
Real-World Impact
Change measured in people, not paperwork
David has spent years working directly with the people most employment and support systems struggle to reach: individuals carrying trauma, disadvantage, mental ill-health and long histories of being talked at rather than worked with. His focus has never been theory. It’s been the room: who’s in it, what they walk in carrying, and who they are by the time they leave.
Through KICKS Empowered, that approach now reaches participants across employment services nationwide, including women, men, young people and First Nations communities, in programs designed to create a genuine shift in self-belief, not just tick a compliance box. The results speak in completion rates, in repeat bookings from providers, and most of all in participants who arrive withdrawn and leave ready to face work and life differently.
Works where the need is
Directly alongside employment services participants facing real barriers to work and wellbeing.
Outcomes that hold
Change designed to last beyond the room, supported by an ongoing network of care.
Trusted by providers
Relied on by employment services partners who see the difference in their own participants.
DV-Informed Government Instructor
Trained to teach where safety and trauma intersect
David delivers domestic-violence-informed instruction within government and community settings, work that demands far more than technique. Teaching personal safety to people who have experienced abuse, coercion or violence requires an understanding of trauma, triggers and trust, and a way of holding a room that keeps everyone safe emotionally as well as physically.
This DV-informed lens runs through everything KICKS Empowered does. It’s why participants, particularly women and those who have survived violence, describe the programs as a rare space where they feel genuinely safe, respected and able to rebuild confidence on their own terms.
Founder & Operational Leader
Building the team and the structure around the work
As founder and CEO, David leads KICKS Group’s partnerships, program design and delivery operations. He is a qualified life coach and is currently studying counselling.
Clinical services offered through KICKS Clinical Pathways are delivered by suitably qualified clinicians, who make their own independent assessment and treatment decisions. David’s role is to build the structure around them: provider partnerships, referrals, scheduling, venues and quality.
Where It Started
A martial arts foundation
David’s background is in martial arts, and it’s where he first learned how a structured, physical environment can transform the way a person sees themselves. That insight became the engine for everything that followed, but today it’s the method, not the message. The goal was never to make people fighters. It was to use experience, not lecture, to help them stand taller.
