Peace House Brings Safe Bars Training to Park City Nightlife

Flanagan's on Main received its Safe Bars certification from Peace House in April, a concrete step forward for Park City's nightlife safety as the organization rebuilt a training program that staffing shortages had shuttered in 2022. Westgate Resort and Red Banjo Pizza are next on the list.

The program is a free two-hour session for bar and restaurant employees that teaches useful and safe tools for recognizing and responding to harassment and assault. Businesses that complete the training earn a one-year Peace House certification, and the shelter's phone number is posted inside every certified establishment so anyone who feels unsafe knows exactly where to turn.

Jenifer Heredia, Peace House's bilingual community relations, said the goal is "to be anywhere and everywhere to help others in potentially unsafe situations." For Park City's Main Street bars and resort venues, that means front-line staff, not just managers or security, are being equipped to act.

Sessions open with role-play exercises designed to make employees comfortable before a live situation demands a response. Staff then work through the "5 D's," a structured intervention framework. One of the D's, Direct, means walking up to a suspected aggressor and plainly telling them their behavior is bothering someone else.

A deliberate thread running through the curriculum challenges the instinct to explain away aggressive behavior by pointing to how much someone has had to drink. "I think that's the first go ahead that people kind of use," Heredia said. "It's like, 'Oh yeah, well he/she is drunk, or they're drunk.' So taking that stigma away from the alcohol, we're definitely not trying to criminalize alcohol." Peace House's position is clear: accountability belongs with the person acting aggressively, not the substance.

The Safe Bars program is one track of a broader Summit County prevention strategy. During the 2024-25 school year, Peace House's Prevention Specialist delivered Utah Board of Education-approved violence prevention curricula to 3,476 students and faculty across 178 presentations, reaching every school district in the county. The bar training and the K-12 curriculum are two pieces of the same effort to build a community that recognizes and responds to domestic violence and sexual assault before either takes root.

All Peace House resources, including shelter contact information posted inside certified venues, are available in English and Spanish. Patrons who witness something wrong at a Park City bar should look for the Safe Bars certification and posted shelter number, or contact Peace House directly. Peace House is also a finalist for the Park City Community Foundation's Women's Giving Fund; supporters can vote through July 13 at parkcitycf.org/votewgf.