 I'd like to welcome everyone to this conversation series, particularly today because we're gonna talk about survivor engagement and survivor leadership in the anti-trafficking movement. My name is John Richmond and I serve as the United States Ambassador at Large to monitor and combat trafficking in persons at the US State Department. I am so grateful to get to serve an office of talented professionals who are thinking all the time about how we can engage governments, how we can improve systems around all three P's of the three P paradigm. That's prevention and protection and prosecution. We believe that all three are inextricably intertwined. They're all necessary and essential to this work. But at the heart of all of it are survivors. Our survivors who have incredible lived experience, they understand these issues in a way that others just don't. And I think hearing from them, not just hearing from allies and responders, but actually hearing from survivors themselves matters. And that's what we're gonna spend our time today doing. And so I welcome you in a sense to pull up a chair to this virtual table. We wanna have a great conversation. We've got some phenomenal friends around this table with us and I can't wait to introduce them to each of you today. We've got Jessa Crisp, who is a leader in the anti-trafficking space. She's the co-founder of Bridge Hope, anti-trafficking nonprofit based in Colorado. And she was recently appointed to the governor's council on trafficking in persons in Colorado. So Jessa is big time. Jessa, we're so glad to have you here. It truly is a delight. Thank you. I'm also glad that Ashley Garrett's with us. Ashley and I have known each other for years. We've traveled internationally. She's done everything in this space. She's an incredible ally in the anti-trafficking movement and currently leads the human trafficking program at ICF, a global consulting service company, where she's thinking all the time about strategic ways that we can engage survivors and elevate their voices. She's got more than 20 years experience. I've learned a ton from Ashley and actually we're glad you're here. Thanks, it's great to be here. We also have our friend Amy Ray from the Freedom Fund. Amy is just super thoughtful about issues regarding how the anti-slavery movement can mature. She leads the North America work for the Freedom Fund. It's based out of New York. And again, I've learned a ton from Amy in this space and I'm grateful for her voice and her leadership, particularly with their new initiative, Freedom Rising, which hopefully, if Amy's willing, she can share with us a little bit about today. Super happy to be here and really excited to talk more about Freedom Rising. Yeah, and the fourth friend around the table is Chandra, who started Mentari, which is a survivor empowerment program. Chandra and I have known each other as well for years, spoken on panels together at Columbia. She served as an advisor to me in many ways. Grateful for not just her insight and her time, grabbing coffee from time to time, but also for her energy and her enthusiasm around not just what survivors endured, but how survivors can thrive, how they can really make an impact on this movement. So before we get started, let me just share with everyone what I shared with our guests today, which is I invited them to have a conversation, to be willing to interrupt each other even in a polite, not a disruptive way, but to really think through some of the issues around survivor engagement and how we can improve in the anti-trafficking movement. So I am incredibly grateful. There's a chat space for you guys to put in questions and we're gonna reserve some time at the end for the questions you have or the ideas that you wanna share or ask of Amy, Jessa, Ashley or Chandra. So please feel free to throw that in the chat space and we'll get to it. So let me start with you, Jessa. I know, first of all, congratulations for finishing your master's program. Huge kudos to you. I know that's a ton of work. You know, I know that you've been providing training on trauma-informed practices. Would love for you to share a little bit about what do you see as the future of the anti-trafficking movement? Totally, I'm very passionate as you know about trauma-informed practices and survivor-centered care. And one of the things that I'm seeing as a theme is a lot of organizations are pairing survivor voices as the heartbeat of trauma-informed services. And yet it is such that we need to go ahead and not just have one conversation with one survivor and say, oh, that's trauma-informed care. Instead, we need to go ahead and listen to a multitude of voices and not just listen, but go ahead and then implement. So what you're saying is like, just because an organization gets input from one survivor one time, that's not sufficient. That's not gonna be enough. That's correct. I fully believe that. And so for me, the future of the anti-trafficking movement is how can we then go ahead and implement multiple voices to aid in trauma-informed practices? So what advice would you have for someone who says there's someone on this meeting? They lead a small shelter somewhere in the United States or somewhere around the world. They wanna have survivors engaged, but they're not quite sure what to do. Where would you encourage them to start? I would go ahead and encourage them to go ahead and start by reaching out to different survivor leaders, lived experience experts, and possibly go ahead and create a advisory council and then not just create the advisory council, but when you get feedback, have the humility to go ahead and then implement that feedback. And really enter into a place of wanting to grow, enter into a place, a posture of growing, because I think that's how we can go ahead and collaborate best with other organizations with trauma-informed practices, but then also to list survivors of all firms of lived experience. I think that makes a ton of sense. And just that posture of humility and truly survivors of different types of trafficking, labor trafficking as well as sex trafficking or different forms of those larger categories, just to get more and more input. No, I really appreciate that. Chandra, you've been leading a survivor empowerment program for quite some time. I didn't even mention in kind of as I introduced you that you were actually served, you were appointed by the president of the United States to serve on the US advisory council on human trafficking. So thank you for your service on that. You've been in this space a long time. As we move forward, what do you think we need to do in terms of progress when it comes to survivor engagement? First of all, I would like to thank to the US government that recognize survivor advice to be at the US advisory council and also fostered by OSCE to be in the national advisory council to the old SCE, which is more bigger global and globally. But it is interesting question for myself actually because of I'm leading mentality and I would like to always give opportunity to survivor to be involved in many different engagement like Jessa said, directly and directly. So engagement not only directly, but also indirectly. Example like Jessa mentioned advisor consultant, but I also want to mention about professionalism that most or many survivor has education. They become CEO, they become teacher and you know, many different position. And I would like us to give opportunity for them to grow, to accept them, not because of their survivor, but let's see them as a human being. And one thing, let's include survivor on advocacy and legislation lobby because they are the best. Why they are the best? They live the experience, they will give a meaningful conversation to legislator to pass or to oppose the legislation that not beneficial to survivor or anti-trafficking movement. That's really rich. I like the idea of direct and indirect. That's really helpful. Sean, can you tell me a little bit about your work around mentorship? Cause I know you've talked before about the importance of mentorship for survivors. Yes. I think we should develop as I'm a survivor leader, I can categorically myself having many different type of engagement to develop mentorship too. Survivors that just came out, one is sustainable mentorship and stable, which is to move for the mind as a victim become a survivor and a threat. Why? Because they need our guideline, our companion to pass the recovery and integration without mentorship, they have no path. So mentorship kind of helping them to identify the safety and then also the future of themself. So it's very important. Mentorship and leadership. So it's direct involvement and direct involvement. That's really rich. That's really rich. So much of our conversation, I feel like around protection as the protection P is around sort of the urgent short-term needs, the acute needs, right around an operation as soon as the victim's been identified. But Amy, one of the things that you, I feel like have talked about really thoughtfully is the need for long-term ideas, long-term freedom. Can you share a little bit about kind of where you've been doing in sort of the thought leadership space around that? Yeah, I'm really happy that you're asking this question. You know it's one of my favorite things to talk about. So when I do talk about long-term freedom or as we at Freedom Fund have framed it in a recent report, sustained liberation. I'm really talking about supporting survivors in ways that if we put those two terms together, sustained freedom. As you said, the space is really good at dealing with immediate emergency needs of individuals who are currently being victimized or who are directly out of exploitative circumstances. But what we don't do so well is think about where people are at in three and five or even 10 years. And it begs the question, why? Oftentimes it's because it's hard. It's really hard to do. But if our goal, which I hope our goal is to work ourselves out of jobs because we're ending exploitation, then we should be thinking about how do we support people long-term? How is it that we're making sure that people are free in three years, five years, and thriving, like Chandra just said? How do we make sure that people have a long-term free life? And I believe that one of the first things that we have to do in thinking about this is asking ourselves what it takes for us to be free in our own lives. Everybody who's on this webinar thinking about what are the various things that helped me feel free in my life? And while we might all have different responses to that, I can almost guarantee that everybody has the same underlying thread of economic stability, financial stability. And in fact, one of the things that we just did with a recent report is ask 88 survivors of bonded labor in India, both children and adults, what is it that makes you feel free? What do you need to feel free? And overwhelmingly people said, we need choice. And for adults, it was choice and employment, choice in economic opportunity, feeling stable and for children, it was choice to play. And a part of what factors into that is that the family has economic stability so that they can play, so they can be a child. So I really think that we have to begin asking ourselves these questions and really engaging with survivors and asking survivors, what do you need to feel free and then start acting upon those things? That's great. And it is asking each individual survivor. I think one of the things that I think surprises people who are built to do programs. We're all trained and we're all working for different organizations. It's all about a strategic approach and a program that's long-term, but every survivor's different. And to individualize this, traffickers don't target in traffic populations, they traffic people. And to treat the individual really matters. Now, I so appreciate your thoughtfulness about that, Amy, particularly around this idea that survivors aren't looking for jobs or looking for careers, right? They want something that's long-term and to have that long-term approach really matters. Ashley, you've been in this movement for a long time. You've been an incredible ally. You've worked in so many different capacities. You've worked for NGOs, international organizations. You've worked for Homeland Security. I feel like you've seen this from a lot of perspectives. As you're looking ahead to 2021, what do you think the movement needs to do better around survivor engagement? Well, first of all, I just want to thank everyone for everything they've already said, because I think they're all foundational and critical to what we're talking about. I think when I look back, and thanks for outing how long I've been working, John, which out's how old I am, but that's okay. Definitely, if we look at the last 10 years of the trafficking movement, we really started to see that shift of saying, oh, wow, people that have lived experience in this might have something meaningful to say. But I would say it's really only been in the last five years that we've actually seen a momentum to bring them to the center of the solution. And I think that's a really different approach. So what do I mean by that? For 10 plus years and more, we've asked survivors to come forward and share their experience in human trafficking to tell their story. That's been the primary way that survivors have been asked to engage. And that is not enough as an ally and as a leader in organizing and running programs. Like, I recognize that that often results in further exploitation and frankly, tokenism. And it doesn't result in the change we need for those programs to actually get and support people to get to that lifelong thriving for not just themselves but their families. So at ICF, we work really hard with our different federal and non-governmental clients to think about how to integrate and equally value the lived experience along with the professional experiences of everyone that we work for. So we have staff who have lived experience in human trafficking, who also have masters in social work and have other experiences in their lives. And so the expertise that they bring is in part informed by their lived experience, but we equally value that in addition to everything else that they bring to the table. I would really, I mean, there's some really great tools out there for organizations to say, how do we really become survivor informed? And it's not as Justice said so brilliantly. It's not a one-off. It's a, how do we staff differently? How do we recruit and create opportunities for consultants? How do we change our human resource practices? And how do we pay in a way that recognizes that lived experience is of value? And we have to pay for that in order to break that cycle. It's the idea of avoiding tokenism really is important. And I know that we have advanced to like not just ask survivors to tell their stories, but we have these councils that we talked about. Amy, I know that you and I were talking about are there downsides to councils? They give good advice, the recommendations that we wanna implement that when you think about that, how do we avoid tokenism in councils and are there downsides to an organization establishing an advisory council of survivors? Yeah, I'll just say, and then open it to other folks as well for thoughts. But I'll just say, I think that the problem or the risk that you take in creating a council is thinking that that's enough, that we're done. We've gotten our survivor input, we've done the best that we can do, so let's keep moving forward. And it's not enough. It's just simply, it's a beginning point. It's a starting point of starting the conversation with survivors and learning how to start integrating survivors into every piece of our work and making sure that we are not just being informed by but being led by those individuals. Can I add something to that, Nan? Yeah. So I would also say that I think councils are, I think they're critical, honestly, because it gives a visual forefront to say, this is a value that we save. But as Amy said, but you also need to create how to operationalize that. So one is really building up council members' skills and how to be effective leaders and council members, right? So you don't come in with someone who has some background and knows how to sit down and talk to an ambassador about how their program works and what should be done effectively. So help empower them with the information to be the most effective. And frankly, as critically is educating and empowering and informing the people that they will be meeting with about how to approach those conversations in a way with the humility that Justa talks about with an understanding that this isn't Justa, I checked the box and I've sat down and heard the council and reported out what I'm doing, but I'm actually really willing to sit down and look into what my organization's policies or regulations are that are different. And I have to be different in that environment too. Can I add a little ambassador? Yeah, Sean. Yeah. I think my experience to set up advisory council and also government consultant and advisor beside stakeholders, the problem is they just at least like ask us to speak, speak, speak, put it in the paper, but they don't hear it. This is the problem. They don't hear it. They just make us as just completion. So they don't have any implementation on that. This is what we have to change in 2021. So everything changed. Let's do better, how we listen and implement. So this is my encouragement to everybody. Thank you. No, I think you're right. There's a huge implementation gap, right? Between what we say we want and then what actually happens. It's true for governments with their laws, like lots of parchment promises, lots of good words on paper, but I was telling a friend recently, I've never met a victim or a survivor that is desperately calling out for another UN resolution. They want something more specific to happen. It's not that UN resolutions aren't good. We work hard on them. Got an amazing multilateral team at the state department that is engaged on this, but survivors want more. One of those implementation gaps is around accountability. We've seen a 38% decline in global prosecutions of trafficking. I know that we talk about this all the time as a need to do better, like in terms of a public justice delivery system to make it better experienced. But from a survivor perspective, how does the fact that most survivors never see their traffickers held accountable? Most survivors don't ever see the police arrest or restrain or detain their trafficker. What impact does that have on survivors? Is there a different lens that we should take around the lack of perpetrator accountability from a survivor perspective? Shauna, do you have thoughts on that? Yes. This is very interesting question because I've been doing policy and also how we hold trafficker, you know, sex-buyer and the allies accountable. I think this is a very important question in 2021. And besides, you know, on accountability, I think we should do more on labor trafficking because I don't see enough prosecution on labor trafficker. Besides, we want equal justice. I always say, I always put up the equal justice. Why equal justice? Because the element to approach on victim, I can say victim before survivor, victim always deserve equal justice. Services for themselves, sustainable, stable, long-term services that approach on help, mental health, dental. So dental is very expensive and we have to pay a lot on that. And also education, vocational training, job placement and job opportunity. But we concentrate on trafficker all the time, on sex trafficking, but we forget. I think we start addressing the demand, which is awesome but we forget to address the third party facilitators of sex trafficking. On labor trafficking, I think we should talk more on supply chains beside labor trafficker prosecution because supply chains is very important. It's very important. And I think we will be better in holding those people accountable because why it will give a confidence, peace to someone that victimized by this crime because of I felt it wasn't enough for me because some of my traffickers and people who abuse me like sex buyer, like the restaurant, still out there, only three people that prosecuted. And it gives me PTSD more beside the experience because I feel like, oh, they will get me. They will be there for me. They will, you know, they will approach me. So a lot of things, I think equal justice on prosecution is very important to serve justice, to give justice, to make sure that this person get back to fully freedom, dignity and humanity. So that's what I can say. And avoid the impunity. If possible, we have to address impunity in 2021 more deeper, more details, and also practicing non-punishment principle. Why I talk about non-punishment principle? Ambasar drug, so many victims didn't treat it properly because they treat them like a criminal, especially on sex exploitation. So I think we should change this behavior and practice to see beneath the surface. So back, see beneath the surface. Who she is, who he is, what happened? So we can find out the exact problem. Yeah, so that's, you know, from me about accountable. Thank you. Thank you, Sean. You know, I really appreciate your thoughts, particularly around ending impunity and but also on the idea of non-punishment and this principle, I'm consistently worried that you're more likely to get arrested as a victim of human trafficking than as a trafficker in the United States and really all around the world. And this idea that we do not want to ever punish victims of trafficking for the things that their traffickers compel them to do feels like it should be a very clear principle that everyone can agree on. Just to toss it out for everybody, any other thoughts about what does it communicate to a survivor about their value when the laws are never applied to their trafficker when there's no prosecution? What sort of statement does that make from a victim's perspective? Yeah, I would love to jump in and answer that. I would think, so from my own personal experience and then from walking with multiple other survivors, it can be a really damaging process. So there can be a lot of re-termitization that can take place through the process because of the lack of trauma-imperim services throughout the interviewing process, throughout the whole court process and the feeling out of control and all of that which can speak to the survivor that they don't have that their trafficker or the person who's taken advantage of them is treated with more value than they are. And then that creates the fear of even speaking up in the future, as Sandra mentioned. And so some of the things that I'm seeing as a need are education for attorneys, for judges, for law enforcement, for forensic interviewers, not just education on what trafficking is and surrounding labor trafficking and sex trafficking and all firms and typologies of trafficking and all of that, but then also to around how complex trauma impacts the brain and impacts the way survivors might recount their experiences. So I think all of that needs to take place. I think our courtrooms need to become more trauma-informed which could potentially help aid in keeping traffickers more accountable and make the process of the court process something that is healing versus re-traumatizing and whether that's criminal or civil. We've seen a rise in civil cases in the last couple of years. Hopefully that trend will continue. And I just appreciate you mentioning that at the end that in addition to the criminal piece, there's a civil remedy. But actually it looked like you were about to say something. Yeah, I was gonna say, I also think we're at a point where I would challenge what justice means because I think we fall into a paradigm in a criminal justice response that is all about justice means going after the perpetrator. And when we look and this is what I've learned from many of my colleagues that have lived experience that there are quite frankly, the systems that created the vulnerabilities are in just as well. And so being able to look at justice as access to meaningful healthcare for both those that are recovering and moving forward with their lives but also the multi-generational impact that stepping in and holding, so really holding our society accountable for is a form of justice. And I think that we're never, frankly, we're not gonna be able to arrest our way out of trafficking. It will continue and it's hugely important that we continue to respond from the criminal justice lens and do it in the ways that Jassa just so beautifully articulated. But there's more to it than that. And when the majority of resources are going to that criminal justice response, that means that the short-term interventions just continue the cycle keeps going. So if you look at things like taking more of a public health approach that's really looking at the whole needs of the individual and those that are vulnerable and really challenging to say how can we do healthcare differently? How do we do education differently? Those are pieces that are about justice. And I think that's an opening we're just starting to see in the anti-trafficking field. And I don't think we could have gone there until we had 20 years of a criminal justice response. And now that that's starting to really, there's some really good lessons we know about what works and doesn't, but we need to go take it in a different level as to what justice can mean and who needs to be held accountable. Actually, I've often said that justice, that my philosophy professor in college could not define. It's really just making wrong things right. It's seeing something wrong and making it right. And you're absolutely right. We're never going to arrest our way out of trafficking. We're also never going to educate our way out of it or shelter our way out of it. It's going to take everything. We've got to have a functioning criminal justice system that's going to be an essential aspect, but it's not sufficient. It's necessary, but not sufficient. And I think you're absolutely right that thinking about the systems that cause people to be vulnerable are important too. And that is a form of justice. The sad thing is we're not, our arrests are going down and our prosecutions are going down, not up. It's not as if we've over-invested in the criminal justice approach. We need to invest in all of these approaches. Amy, it looks like you had something to say on that point too. Yeah, I just wanted to, I mean, A, I want to give snaps and claps, everything that was just nodding vehemently. But I also wanted to highlight one of the things that Chandra said, which was around supply chains, right? So I think oftentimes we're talking about prosecution largely from a sex trafficking perspective, largely in a U.S. perspective. But if we're talking about supply chains, right? When some of the work that we do is in the garment sector and COVID, right? What an example of what happened with huge retailers who had all of these orders in and COVID hit. And they said, whoops, never mind. And they don't pay until they receive the orders. All of these orders were made, people worked and people never got wages. And so how do you actually hold, not only like individual traffickers, how do you hold these corporations accountable and responsible for the trafficking that they're perpetuating for this offense, right? And we haven't caught up to that. And there's some really wonderful large corporations who are starting to come around and say, we want to do better. We want to know how to really dig into our supply chains and think about the impact that we're having by trying to have cheaper and cheaper products for consumers. And that's great. And we need more people to do that. And we need more people to say, this is actually wrong, this shouldn't be happening. But in order to do that, people need to be held accountable. So I just wanted to highlight that point because I think we don't talk about it enough. It's a great point. It's, you know, when we think about supply chains, we are seeing a growth in this area in terms of accountability, whether it's withhold release orders from customs, not letting goods made with forced labor enter the United States. We're seeing a growth in that. We're seeing more investigations into entities or corporations that might be engaging in a venture that has forced labor in it and they're benefiting either knowingly or just recklessly disregarding the fact that there's forced labor in their supply chain. So hopefully that trend will continue. But we have a long way to go. Obviously the number one recommendation for the last five years in the different part for the United States was to increase labor trafficking cases. And we haven't done it. And it's a huge gap that needs to be corrected. We need to do a better job here on forced labor cases. And honestly, the whole world should improve their approach to forced labor. That's really interesting. You know, another thought that we've been noodling on a lot at the State Department is measurement. How do we measure impact? How do we figure out just to go beyond our activities and that we do our activities well but do our activities actually produce a result? That feels even harder in the space of the survivor leadership and survivor engagement and protection services for survivors. Do you all have thoughts about how as a field the movement can measure impact? What should we be measuring? Or what rulers should we be using to measure? I mean, I talk a little bit about how we do this in some of our leadership programs. And so I see if we run a couple of different types of leadership academies where we bring together individuals with lived experience and allied professionals and they work together on a challenge question, but they also are learning leadership skills in the application of it. And they're doing it on an equal playing field, right? Everyone needs to learn about leadership and how to be effective. So some of the ways you then look beyond is what do they do then after that happens? We've had graduates that have received promotions. We have graduates who have changed careers and moved into working in one area versus another. When you look at how to assess if survivor-infirmed training resulted in change did the board members that you trained change their process? Was the vision changed? Was the organizational policies changed? Those are really tangible things that are actual is actual change, right? Versus just check, I just spent, well, people just went through an academy or 15 board members just got trained on this. It's really looking at what's the goal of the training, what's the change in behavior and can you measure it? Interesting, interesting. Jessa, it looks like you have a thought. Yeah, I have multiple thoughts, but I think the big thing is how are organizations defining a win and being able to go ahead, clarify that and then begin to utilize measurement tools to begin to track that change. The one thing I think when it comes to survivor leadership and just change in the human development and growth of us as individuals is that, so one thing about me is I love hiking mountains and I live in Colorado, so I have lots of mountains around to hike. But when you hike a mountain, you go up and sometimes you have switchbacks, sometimes you go into valleys and you don't see the progress. You don't see the growth taking place. And I think the same thing can be with survivor leadership. Right now during COVID, one of the things that we're seeing within the survivors that we're working with is that COVID is making it harder for leaders, survivor leaders, lived experience experts who've maybe been out of the life for 15 years and then they've lost their job to actually be gone to enter into a place of stability again. And so that's kind of like climbing a mountain, like you have that valley. And so in the midst of also having those measurements and defining wins, I do want to go ahead and just caution that sometimes growth doesn't necessarily look like growth. And yet how can we as allies still provide, as Amy has mentioned so beautifully today, that long-term stability and sustainability. I really love that switchback and hiking analogy. That's really helpful. You're right, it's what do we define as a win? How do we measure that? The reality is traffickers are not confused about how they measure success. They know exactly what they're doing. They are crystal clear about their goal and what is a win for them. And I think we have to be equally clear. Amy, how should we measure success in this region, in this area? I have very strong views on this. I think I'm going to reiterate some of what already has been said and some of what I did already say is I really hope that we continue to push ourselves. We continue to push ourselves to think about long-term goals, right? And as we've just heard, not thinking about, okay, we've supported X amount of people, which is helpful. It's helpful reference. So many people went through our program, but how many of those people in three years time have a job that's supporting them where they're able to pay rent and by groceries? How many people are feeling or are able to access are able to access real mental health services and real trauma-informed services? I think really truly thinking about the long-term is incredibly important. I also think thinking about resiliency and community resiliency. Part of what we like to do in our process of scoping is do research about the communities and what's happening within those communities, where are the vulnerabilities? Is it poverty? Is it racism? Is it sexism? Is it there's a whole lot of underlying vulnerabilities to what makes people susceptible to trafficking or to being trafficked? And then going back and looking at what's changed, have we changed some parts of those vulnerabilities so that it's less likely for children in those communities to be exploited so that it's less likely for women to be trafficked? And I think that's really important to think about that as well, that it's not just individuals that goes through our programs, but it's also the entire community. Because again, in order to work ourselves out of jabs, we're gonna have to think about ending those vulnerabilities and creating greater community resiliency. I just so appreciate your long-term approach. We've talked a lot when we're talking about the systems change with governments that we're planting orchards, not gardens, right? A garden is gonna produce produce in season. It might take six or seven years before a tree produces good fruit. And we need to do both, right? We need vegetables in season. That's important work. We need the immediate responses, but to also be planning orchards, to also be thinking long-term about measurement and success. Shandra, do you have thoughts on the measurement question? Yes, thank you for asking. I think measurement is depending on the methodology and also depending on which area that you want to measure, right? Example on the housing, how many bed now available if we compare from 10 years ago, from five years ago? Since this is a part of the measurement of success from the view of survival perspective and involvement, example, the prevention. How the comprehensive prevention look like? How the protection look like expanding the witness protection? Or the visa, how many visa that you give? That's a part of the measurement. In my global measurement on the global, you know, improvement, I think we are getting better, especially United States are leading. And I truly believe that United States started, I think the first country that started survival leadership, the one that I knew, and we comprehensively involved in the government and also in many different sectors. And I saw, if I compare with 20 years ago, 10 years ago, five years ago, even now, wow. It's amazing. I just see from survival leadership, so many, new leader, pop-up, resilience, passionate. Just, I want to jump in. I want to do something to make a better changes. So this is what I can give to this panel. Let's come together because our work is not done. And 2021 is waiting. We need to measure the impact, let's come together. Yeah. No, I really appreciate that hopeful perspective, right? Because there's, we criticize ourselves a lot. We're always critiquing ourselves because we want to get better. But I appreciate you just noting that there has been progress. It may not be sufficient. We're not there yet, all that. But there is space to acknowledge that the professionals that have been working on this have made progress around survivor engagement, even though there's still a long way to go. So it's kind of you to recognize that, even though there's a lot left to do. And we're going to jump into questions from the audience. Evidently, there's tons that have been coming in, which is really encouraging. There's a lot of interest. But before I do that, I mentioned at the beginning, Amy, you've got a new initiative. Could you just take a minute or two and share with folks what Freedom Rising is? Very happy to. I'm very excited about Freedom Rising. Freedom Rising is our newest program. We just launched it two weeks ago. And it's truly born from the core of our values and beliefs at the Freedom Fund that the people who know best for solutions and for what needs to change within the movement are people who are most impacted by exploitation. And when I say that, I mean, be that survivors, be that women, because as we know, 70% of people who are exploited in the world are women and girls. Or be that the community around these women, around these survivors. And so that is a core part of our model. And we were thinking a few years ago about how do we support the leaders of these frontline organizations that we support? How do we help them grow into leadership? And as we were looking at the leaders of these frontline organizations, we realized or were confronted with something a bit disturbing for us, which was most of these organizations, while they're wonderful, we're not being led by the very people who are most impacted by slavery, women and survivors. So this created a feeling in us that we wanted to help change it. So we started developing this program called Freedom Rising, which is a leadership program for women and survivors who are already working within the anti-slavery movement to support them into leadership positions within the anti-slavery movement. And we're launching initially in Southern India. And what I feel really excited about, I mean, I feel excited about a lot of things about this program, but I feel so excited because it's all of these women and all of these survivors coming together. And it's a year-long, very experiential program where people get to come together, network together throughout that year, create a broader network but also get to learn with each other and confront their own internal bias, right? Oftentimes we learn bias about our own selves from the community around us. So let's look at why there aren't more women and survivors in leadership positions. What are the biases that got us here? So let's confront that within ourselves. Let's confront that within our organizations and let's confront that within our communities and only through that confrontation through those difficult conversations with ourselves and with one another, can we actually start to make that change? And one of the things that I love to highlight about this is in the development of this program, what participants were saying because this was truly this program was informed by the individuals in Southern India who would be going through the program. People said, well, this isn't gonna matter if the people who are leading the organizations right now aren't a part of it. If they don't change their minds, we're never gonna get into leadership. And so we're leaving 25% of the spots open to the men who are in leadership so they can go through this journey as well so that they can start to confront power dynamics and sexism, racism and all of those various things that are keeping people out of leadership positions. So I'm really excited because we had put it on pause and we decided to launch because we were hearing from program participants, they want to start at least the virtual aspect so people can start connecting and start a peer mentoring program. So that's freedom rising. That's awesome. And kudos to you for starting it in Southern India. I have a affinity for that. So it was my second home. I loved living in India. A lot of great people there. So yeah, I'm grateful that Freedom Fund has taken this initiative on. There's lots of survivor leadership programs. We know Rescue Freedom out in Seattle has an amazing program. IJM has a great survivor program. So there's Wellspring, Thistle Farm, Survivor Alliance. Gosh, there's so many. But it does feel like this is a new thing that organizations are taking on. And the National Traffic and Shelter Alliance has thought about this as well. So I'm encouraged. It feels like there are lots of new opportunities for survivors to engage in leadership programs and that can advance this mission. So I really like the thoughtful way that you've constructed this. Now we're going to shift to some of the questions that have been coming in via the chat. And I'm really excited about the participation here. I don't think we're going to be able to share all the questions because there's so many. But let's go ahead and get started. We have one for you, Jessa. This came in from Robert Benz at the Frederick Douglass Family Initiative. So grateful for all of their work over the years. And this is what Robert asked. Is the victim-centered approach still the most sound strategy for ending human trafficking? The victim-centered approach, is it still sound or do we need to make some changes to it as we go forward? That's a great question. So just for those who don't know, a victim-centered approach basically seeks to minimize the re-traumatization that is associated typically with the criminal justice process and then also to providing support of victim advocates and service providers and then empowering survivors as basically those lived experience experts of their own story and of the traumas that they've experienced. And so with that being said, I think this question could very much be divided up into two different ways, at least the way that I am basically interpreting it. But I think very much when we look at the most sound strategy for ending human trafficking, that becomes a very complicated systemic issue that we need to be looking at from multiple different lens, not just from the lens of this victim-centered approach. Some people might call it a survivor-centered approach. And so with that being said, I think we need to look beyond and say, what are other ways that we can go ahead and begin ending the sadistic problem of human trafficking? With that being said though, I believe that we still need to be empowering survivors and victims and we still need to be having that survivor-centered victim-centered approach. So I know it doesn't really necessarily answer the question, but I do think it's a much deeper, broader issue and topic. Ashley, do you have a thought about this? Could it look like you wanted to jump in on this one? Oh, gosh, okay. I mean, I'll always. I think that victim-centered or survivor-centered is critical to the criminal justice response. Like it recognizes in ways that, frankly, many countries' laws don't, that victims should be at the center, even if they're not protected in the same way as perpetrators. So I think that is foundational. And I've spent a lot of years pushing that and supporting communities and countries and doing that, and I've been able to see a shift in how that process can be experienced and what justice looks like for those individuals. That being said, to respond to human trafficking, it is restrictive because it assumes that someone has to have experienced the crime. And so one of the things that we're starting to talk about is, and this isn't new to trafficking, but is similar to a lot of other things where we're talking about social sectors that have social problems where people are struggling, is person-centered. And so it's not saying, I'm gonna talk to you because you're a victim of this crime or because you've survived. I'm gonna talk to you because you matter and I wanna explore what that looks like. And it allows us in the human trafficking response to look not just at protection after the crime, but it looks at protection long-term. It looks at protection for families, not just the individuals that have experienced the crime and it looks at the prevention side of it. And so the other piece is that a lot of times having that label, like we use the word victim-centered when we're talking about legal protections because that term victim is written into laws with opportunities for resources, basically, or rights. But when we're talking about the care we're looking for, whether it's prevention or long-term care, we don't wanna use that because people don't identify with those terms in many ways. And we're creating a construct that isn't about them, it's about our system instead of what they're looking for. Does that make sense? I love that person-centered, right? It gives back this idea that it needs to be individualized. We're not working with stereotypes or populations or communities. Sometimes we're dealing with a specific person who's got a unique response to what they've endured. That's really thoughtful. Hey, we got a question that I wanna toss out, Amy, to you. It's from Kimberly Dymard at the Hugh Jackson Foundation and she asks, do survivors feel that there are sufficient resources available in their communities? I think I know your answer, but you can knock this one out of the park. And I'm just gonna apologize in advance. I have some fun New York apartment sounds happening from below. I have some construction happening underneath me, I think, where somebody's hanging a painting. Anyway, so it's always interesting to talk about resources, right? And how do we wanna frame resources? So what is resources? Is it money? Is it money going to survivors directly? Is it money going to programmatic needs? And I think what's meant in this question is, are there resources to meet programmatic needs, to meet survivors' needs? And my response is gonna be, no. There's not enough resources in certain ways. I think there are in some very critical ways. I think we've done a lot of incredible work and we're pushing money in great areas in terms of supporting people in like mental health services and supporting people in shelters and those kinds of things. I mean, we still have work to do, but resources are going out to communities. But if we start to think more broadly, are we talking about sex trafficking survivor communities? Are we talking about labor trafficking survivor communities? If we're talking in the US, there are certain states that refuse to acknowledge that labor trafficking might be happening in their state. Within the world, there are certain areas where people are saying, no, labor trafficking or sex trafficking isn't an issue. We don't have this issue. And we know that it's an issue everywhere. And so if we're talking about, I mean, I think there's several resources that we don't give people access to that I want to highlight here and that I have heard from many survivors, both from working with Survivor Alliance and also in the work that we do now at Freedom Fund is a access to education. And so not just primary education, which is something we do deal with children, but what if somebody wants to go to get a bachelor's degree? What if somebody wants to get a master's degree? How many schools that are actually producing really interesting research on human trafficking, on modern slavery? How many people are actually giving scholarships to survivors? It's slim, it's very slim, it's very grim. And then again, with economic empowerment, economic opportunity. So again, going to the long term, right? So where are we providing access points to those opportunities to be okay long term? And part of that is education and a part of that is economic training, economic support, hiring people within our own organizations and making sure people just have those various access points. So yes, we're, you know, certain communities and then certain areas we are providing good resources, but we could do a lot better and we should be asking survivors directly what are the resources you need? Where are we, where is there a dearth of resources within these communities? How can we get better? And then we should raise the money and put that, put those resources there. I really like that point about education too. Have you seen any groups that are doing that well where they're resourcing around either scholarships or opportunities for folks to get education? I'll pass that off because I don't know of any, to be honest. So this is something that I'm very passionate about and through some of the work that I've been able to do with conversations with different academic institutions, I do know that some academic institutions have created their own scholarships specifically for survivors of human trafficking, but it's very few. When you look at the percentage of academic institutions for higher education versus the number of scholarships, it's such a small percentage. And yet, when we look at that economic empowerment and helping survivors for moving as Amy was talking about into long-term sustainability, education is such a vital piece of that because that is one way that one can move into a different SES status, so different social economic status. That's a different way that one can create greater financial stability. And so I would say it's a huge need. There are a few more organizations that nonprofits that are providing survivor scholarships, but $500, $1,000 does not go far in relation to pain tuition, especially if a survivor is unable to get financial aid due to immigration status, like I've experienced also due to other elements, whether it's debts related to their traffickers, just the whole element having just charges against them. So it is something that we need to grow in. And I think Amy, like it's just so amazing to hear you talking about it because it is such, I believe is such an essential part of the recovery process and helping survivors move into being that professional and the person that they are becoming. It is such an important issue because, when we think about the stat, there's $150.2 billion a year from trafficking. And I'm not sure if that stats all that reliable, but it's a lot of money, right? There's a lot of money that traffickers are making. We're nowhere close to matching that in terms of resources. So I'm really interested, particularly as we come into the final quarter of this year, what philanthropy around trafficking is gonna look like and how organizations are gonna do. And hopefully we'll find that out in first quarter, but hopefully resources will continue. Both from governments. And I'm excited that the resources that we keep getting more and more to program out around human trafficking at the State Department. So I'm grateful for that, but interested in other governments as well as the private sector, what it ends up doing around resourcing these programs. But you bring up some great, great points. Shondra, I wanted to, we got a question from Adalia Rivera in the chat and asking you, could you talk about titles for quote survivor mentors as we continue to stay trauma informed and victim centered? Do you have any thoughts about titles in respect to how we talk about survivor mentors? I think we should avoid to give a title because of everybody equal in survivor leadership and also mentorship. I can say, it is a process. I know in the term of the real term is will be mentor, mentee, and someone that we receive a mentor. But in the term of respecting, to avoid separation, usually in my organization, we are blended. We are blended with them. We put a few mentors at the same time. So accompany them, guide them with the training. So we have a survivor mentor and leadership together. So I don't suggest to give a title on it just to feel that I will support them. So we do organization of volunteer on helping each of them instead of I'm your mentor. It's really like, I don't like to be mentor because that's how the way it's happened in the trafficking situation. If you have a bottom or someone they teach you how to do it and I don't want it to happen, I think we should avoid to apply or replicate the situation in trafficking in the real life now because we want to give a freedom. Even though with the mentorship, we have a choices, which one that you want to go fast. So I don't want to take so much on this, but I will be able to answer or to help organization that want to start mentorship and leadership, please email me. Thank you. Excellent, excellent. You know, we've known for years that sex trafficking seems to take up more attention than labor trafficking. We know that as Amy said earlier, most of the victims, according to the stats internationally are that most of the victims are female. You know, the issue of men and boys in trafficking is often not talked about. Actually, I don't know if you have some thoughts about how we can be better at not just having shelters. I know I worked a case many years ago where we had adult men at a restaurant in Kansas and they needed a shelter and we had virtually no place to put them. We actually had to move them four hours away. I know of one shelter that's designated for boys, but few and far between. What do we do around the issue of men and boys in the conversation of survivors? There's a lot to that. I think the Department of Health and Human Services did a series of listening sessions through the National Human Trafficking Training and Technical Assistance Center last fall. And it was all with men and boys and it was developed by men and boys with lived experience. They put the agenda together and facilitated some of the conversations. So I think there's both. There's just the pure, if you look at resources, the resources are marginal compared to the limited resources that are available in general. But I think also we aren't asking the questions. Like we keep talking about, right? We assume, oh, we need this or they need that. And we put and target programming based on our assumptions and not based on what men and boys are saying are their priorities. I also have learned a lot from colleagues with lived experience that are men and boys that there's justice with everything else. There is a huge diversity and that a lot of them have experienced that the default is that if they're male then they must have been a labor trafficking victim or they're a perpetrator. And so, we're missing out on so many people's experiences. And so I think there's a lot to be said about there's some basic research that's been done with very small populations in the United States and elsewhere, mostly looking at runaway and homeless youth or LGBTQI youth. And but I think that's a big part of the problem is again the reason why Survivor Informed is so important is the only way the people that have lived that life that those experiences are the best to tell us what worked and what didn't work. So I never ask somebody, what was your story? Because am I have colleagues that I've known for years I have no idea what their exploitation history is. However, know a lot about the different experiences they had over the course of their life that helped them thrive or not and how we can apply those in that same program. And we need to be asking those same questions with a lot more intentionality to men and boys. Yeah, that's a great point. Jess, it looks like you wanna jump in on that. So sorry about that. Yeah, this is something I'm very passionate about. Actually, Bridge Hope, we work a lot with boys and men and that's kind of our focus at Bridge Hope. And one of the things that we see is that societally there are such a, we have created a society that does not talk about the trauma that men go through whether it fits exploitation from labor exploitation trafficking or if it sucks trafficking. And so I think it starts with us beginning to create a culture where it's okay for men to know that it's okay for them to have experienced pain and trauma too. And I think the Me Too movement has created something for women, at least for me, has created a place where I feel a lot more confident and comfortable walking about. And people because of past advocacy and speaking engagements that I've done, people know that I've experienced that sexual trauma from my exploitation, but yet we have a society that does not create that space for men. One of the things that I see is when I go to conferences and do speaking engagements and talk about the exploitation of men, I have a lineup of men and boys who begin sharing with me that they're so grateful that somebody's talking about it and that they've never shared this with anybody else because they've never felt safe to do so. And so I really feel like we need to create that safety and by creating that safety resources and services as Ashley has mentioned, are gonna look different and we need to ask them what do they need? I know what I need, but I'm not them. And I think that's the beauty of having multiple survivors and being survivor centered is listening and really being centered upon what they need. That's really helpful. Really helpful. And we got a question from Karen Romero at the Freedom Network USA. Amy, you might be in a good position to answer this. What ethical considerations do programs need to take into account when engaging survivors? For example, paying survivors, not tokenizing them, not exploiting them for their story. What are the, like for folks who are listening in, we got, I think over like 900 people are on this call right now as they're thinking about their organizations and engaging with survivors, what ethical considerations should they be thinking about? So no pressure. It's all on you. Just kidding. Well, I think so many brilliant things have already been brought up in this call and I'll just highlight some of the things that have so brilliantly already been said, which is, I mean, when engaging with survivors, there's actually a really helpful form and I'm forgetting where it is, where it lives and somebody else on this call might know about how survivor-informed you are and how ethically survivor-informed you are and you can go through this checklist as an organization and I highly recommend Googling and trying to find it because it's really great. But I do think if you're trying to engage with survivors in order to be better informed, yes, pay survivors. If you're bringing somebody on to inform your programs or to inform the directionality of your organization, hire them as a consultant and I recommend doing so as soon as possible from the very get-go. I think oftentimes within this movement, we all talk about being survivor-informed. It's become the thing that we want to be, which is great. I think it's wonderful, we should be. However, oftentimes we start later on, we start organizations, we start programs, we start solutions and it's after the fact, typically that we're like, oh, we should have a survivor look at this and tell us what they think about it and if it's okay or not and that framing is actually generally problematic because if you hire somebody to come in and look at the program or look at your organization, they might give you some constructive feedback but they're mostly gonna sign off on it. How much more interesting would it be as you're building the organization to actually bring in survivors from the start to say, actually I wanna make sure that I have a survivor who is our COO, but that I have a survivor who is our head of programs, that I have a survivor who is informing this entire process as we build an organization or as we build these solutions, programmatic solutions. So definitely A, bring in survivors as soon as possible. B, pay survivors. C, find ways to get, if you haven't been able to be survivor informed, if you have started to think about what that looks like and you're thinking that maybe you've started hiring survivor consultants, think about starting a fellowship. We've started another program that's actually really exciting in partnership with Survivor Alliance to bring on survivors into our organization and have a one-year fellowship to provide access. Again, it's access points and to not be extractive and to actually say, well, if there's a barrier, maybe because you have a criminal record related to your exploitation because you have a gap in your employment that people question because you weren't able to get that bachelor's degree because of financial constraints, here's an access point. And so maybe it feels scary to hire somebody on full time, but then there's other creative ways. So I think that, and then I also just wanna highlight a part of what has also again been said brilliantly by everyone I think, which is don't assume you know people's stories and don't ask for people's stories. If you are engaging with survivors for employment practice, like to bring somebody on as a consultant, to bring somebody on to work within your organization, to be on a council, to inform your work, don't then ask, well, tell me about what happened to you. Right. It's just not a great way to build a relationship because you know, what if I just went back and asked, well, what's the most traumatic thing that's ever happened in your life? Tell me about it in detail. It's an uncomfortable seat to be in. So ethically, I think starting in the right foot and really treating people as the humans that we all are and engaging in those mindful, thoughtful ways and ensuring that that expertise is valued at the appropriate level. I really appreciate that. In an effort to be transparent, let me just share and then Ashley, I'm happy to toss it to you. We really believe in the idea of compensating survivors. I think it's been a best practice for quite some time, but in an effort just to be transparent, we were unable to compensate any of you for your time today. We tried the laws, the regulations that the government has prevent us. There's not a vehicle to do it. We need to fix that, but you know, so in a sense, we are in part violating our own best practice transparently for what it's worth, but we do value all your time. Ashley, do you wanna speak to that? I just wanna talk about some really specific practical strategies that I've been using for years and one of those is actually just in response because you just said that ambassador. So give people choice. If you don't have the funding to pay for it, tell them that you don't have the funding and this is what you are looking for and let them determine if that's something that makes sense for them, time-wise, right? That doesn't mean that you shouldn't be seeking the funding, but there are other ways just as when I was getting started in my professional career and I did volunteer work that got me published on something and that was a value add for me professionally. So for things that are those opportunities when you don't have the resources, but at the same time, if anyone on the call comes from government funding cycles right into your grants, a dollar amount or a percentage of your budget that goes to paying people that have lived experience. We're starting to see that in the US and it mandates how that happens, right? Because there's money attached to it. The tool that Amy is talking about, I think, is actually through a program that I direct and it's the survivor, it's the organizational toolkit for survivor informed and it came out of a leadership academy made up of survivors and those with lived experience who created that checklist. But we took that checklist a step further and said, how do you then apply? If you scored like crap on some of these, here are practical steps in terms of how to take action and really look at transforming your organization. And then finally on the way of compensation and this sort of aligns in some ways with the question that Shondra did so beautifully and commenting about how to title things. We use a pay structure that's based on the type of work. So anyone that's eligible for the work that we're doing because they're qualified, they get paid the same if they have lived experience or if they don't, it's the same rate. And we layer it by type of intervention rate. So whether it's a technical assistance or training delivery or a peer review or grant review, those have different payments scales but they're all treated the same because the work you're asking them to do is the same. And then I would just say the other thing that on a very kind of more philosophical level is in having this work for so long, one, I know that there are more individuals with lived experience that are in this work and in the world that we live in than identify. And so anytime I am interviewing someone to become a consultant or to become an employee, I assume there is a possibility that they are a survivor whether it's of trafficking or something else. And so I as a supervisor and as a manager have to think differently how I work with my entire team because they're not gonna tell me and that is totally appropriate. In some instances I do know I have staff but I don't make the assumption that the others don't also. So I think those are just some, again, some really practical steps to take and I can make sure that that link to that resource is made available. That's great, that's really good. Since I disclose that we weren't able to pay anybody, I should highlight some of the good policies that we have at the State Department. We have an expert network that is phenomenal and pays survivors for all sorts of input on the early start of our foreign assistance on the TIP report itself that we publish. So there are ways that we're trying to live into this best practice of compensating survivors. And Ashley, I particularly appreciate your comments about making sure that it's done fairly. So the link to that toolkit would be great. We have a question from some friends at A21. Ashley Preston asks, and Shondra, you might be able to help us with this. What are some promising practices or appropriate roles for survivors whether as consultants or employees? How would you answer Ashley's question around that? I think this is an interesting question. Amy, Chesa, and Ashley already informed. Actually, it's already answered. But in my opinion, it's depending on how big is the organization, how much work that you need. But I just want to highlight, if you're an anti-trafficking organization, you have to have a survivor at least as an advisor or consultant. And also you have to discuss how much you wanna pay, how much you want to compensate, how much you accommodate. It is very important. The work that we are doing because of the victim of human trafficking, the work that we are doing not only the work for you, this is for the sake of the victim. This is the sake of million victims around the world. So I suggest you have to find out one or more survivors to be involved whether as a consultant, advisor, or you employee. Like we have to give opportunity. If you never give opportunity to them, what happened? We just want to go together giving opportunity and accept them without putting them in the box. Oh, this is a survivor, Ashley already mentioned. It's good to know that they have experience for some experience but treat them as a professional. I'm sorry to say, I hate when people say, oh, this is Chandra, welcome to, this is survivor of human trafficking. Oh my God, I'm more than that. Right. So please, please highlight you organization here in the United States or internationally, just introduce someone how to weigh the professionalist, not mentioning to fight in the first line instead of respecting the, you know, what is the experience? And you can follow the guide from Ashley, they have a link listed on the chatroom and you always can reach out to us and Amy also expert and engaging survivor and I really want everybody to, you know, to connect with us to be better. Thank you. That's great. You know, as you were sharing that, it reminded me of a program I was running one time we did have a survivor as part of it but she did not want to be known as that. She wanted to be known by her name and she wanted to be known for her work and not by that experience and of course we honor that but I think they're very well could be plenty of survivors in that are being employed right now that just don't want to identify as that and of course that's their right and others who do. Yeah, please. Ambassador, can I just say something to anyone that is a survivor on the call? I have the privilege of meeting with our Leadership Academy a couple of times a year and in every instance I say to them, like we're not even sharing within this group who's a survivor and who's not. You know that there are those within that have that and that don't. It's for you to determine and what you wanna share because you're here as a professional. I tell you that so every single class and we're currently on our sixth class has said, oh, thanks for saying that. As an ally, it's our job to push back so that they don't have to about why I'm not just that. I am a person here in a professional capacity and that's how you treat me. So the title or what that is, we have to and we have to lift up those that are feeling like that's their only value because that's what the Trafficking Movement for many years has told them is that your value is coming to the table to tell your story and that is not your value. Your value is to share your full experience and expertise. And so I as someone who is not a survivor stand aligned with you in saying that your value is not that. And that it's my job to advocate and help in making sure that you also feel empowered in that way. So just cause I hear it every class and it astounds me. It's so it's my one of my soapboxes. Sorry. Thanks for sharing that. I really appreciate it. Names matter and labels shouldn't. And so the idea that we're talking to someone using a label instead of a name. One of the traffickers constantly use a tool of a round identity. So often one of the number one tactics of coercion I see traffickers employing is to change people's names. Whether it's to give them a nickname of some sort, give them another name. All the way back to the, remember the miniseries roots when Kuntakinte with the whole fight was about whether he would be called Toby. And he did not want to give up his identity, his name. And I think we can do really well by flipping the traffickers script and actually calling people by their names what they want to be called restoring that identity. So it's a great point. And we've touched on a lot of things today. We've talked about the problem of community for traffickers and how that impacts survivors. We've talked about leadership programs, long-term versus short-term lenses to apply, the importance of a trauma informed approach, mentorship, scholarships, education, ethical consideration. So many really good things. It's awesome. We're running out of time. I wanted to, as we end, ask each of you a question to reflect on as we're heading into the end of this year. And Shonda, I love the way you said earlier that 2021 is waiting for us. I'm certainly waiting for it. That's for sure. I'm ready to put 2020 in the history books. But as you're thinking about this new year, it's a great time for us to reflect, what are you hopeful for? What is giving you hope about 2021 in the area of survivor leadership? So let me go around, Amy, maybe you could start us off, share with folks what are you hopeful for in this space for 2021? Absolutely. I am also ready for 2021. So in 2021, I am really hopeful for, and I hope to see greater equity and justice for survivors internally within this movement and within our organizations. I think we often, I see this work as being about creating greater equity and justice within the world. And I think oftentimes our organizations, and when we think about equity and justice within our organizations, we think about the external, we think about what we do. So prosecuting traffickers, liberating victims, really the equity and justice in those ways, but really putting that lens internally, what are we doing to support survivors within our organizations and within this movement to be able to truly lead? What are we doing to make sure that we balance the scales in terms of representing men and boys within this movement with representing labor trafficking survivors, with representing people with very diverse backgrounds and really talking about getting real about the vulnerabilities, getting real about racism and its impact cast and its impact and sexism and its impact on us being vulnerable to trafficking. So I am hopeful that we're at this access point in the movement and we've all had a deep reflection period albeit a forced reflection period over this last year so that we really think about the ways in which we can continue to create greater equity and justice internally. It's a great answer. Thank you for sharing that Amy. Jess, let me toss it to you. Same question. What's giving you hope for 2021? You know, I think the thing that gives me hope is we talked earlier about how this call, how this panel is a great way to end the year and seeing the engagement and the questions coming in. I think what gives me hope is the acquisitive nature of individuals who are on this call because through those questions through that inquisitive nature, I believe then we can go ahead and like in conversations that have not yet happened. And so that gives me a lot of hope. That's awesome. Awesome. Shondra, what's giving you hope as you head into 2021? My hope is really big. Giving opportunity to survive and let organization get a special funding or grant from the government. And also addressing COVID-19 is the impact on anti-trafficking movement by addressing online trafficking which effect most vulnerable population, our children. That will be our future of this country and globally. And also addressing, this is addressing survivor involvement, how we treat them better, how we acknowledge them better. Thank you. Thank you. I love that. And Ashley, what about you? Oh, no pressure. Ditto, everything. I mean, probably the most thing I'm most excited about is there's a vaccine and maybe my child will go to school sometime and not be downstairs. But on this moment, I think there's also that being able to come out of this cocoon that we've been in and feeling really helpless about all of the people that have been. So in this movement and survivors and their families in particular that have been so much more at risk because of what's been going on that we can start to step back out and engage with that. But I think the part I'm most hopeful about is a lot about what Jessa just said that this is now a mainstream part of the conversation. It doesn't mean that I'm getting it right. But when I look back at when I started working on human trafficking and people talk to me about you're working on traffic signs and red lights because the term didn't mean anything. And now not only are we talking about human trafficking and sure, there's misperceptions and whatnot about what that could be. It's all sex, it's all girls, all of those things. But there is a norm that has been established and we are at the point where the norm includes something that is about putting those with lived experience at the center of the solution. And that's really exciting. And I just feel really blessed that I get to do work that helps make some of those things happen and I get really excited about what that looks like in the next years to come. That's tremendous, that's tremendous. I love that from all of you. Honestly, having this conversation is just generates a ton of hope for me. Seeing your work, knowing that you guys are out there and knowing that so many others, that there's a lot of people who care deeply about this and want to make a difference. We know that freedom matters, people need to be free and this idea that we can be a part of that journey in some way and come alongside and be allies and helpful is just incredible. Really meaningful work and really just comes down this fundamental idea that people have value. They have intrinsic inherent value and the traffickers who deny that diminish us all. And so I think that that's a great way to end this conversation. I'm so thankful to each of you. For folks who are watching, please follow and support all these guests as they're doing their important work. Jessadilla Crisp, Ashley Garrett, Amy Ray, Chandra. I always mispronounce your last name, Chandra. Well, one and two. Help me say it right as we end. I think you're on mute. I know it's modful, Ambassador. I'm gonna get it. I've known you too long. Well, easily because it's modful. Well, we value each of you and are grateful for all your thoughts, all the thoughtful questions people have shared for everyone that's tuned in. We're gonna have another conversation, I think on January 13th on Wednesday. So feel free to join us. We'll get some information out to you on that. But there's some really important ideas that we have to share looking forward to that time. And honestly, I just wish everyone a fantastic holiday season. Thank you for joining us today and goodbye.