My name is Adriel Vigo, founder and president of the Austin Free Project. The AFP was founded to bring awareness to the growing issue of human trafficking; and involve the community in the battle against it. At its peak, AFP was a partnership of two universities and one community college with members including students of University of Texas, Texas State, and Austin Community College. AFP saw its beginning by creating awareness campaigns throughout college campuses in the Austin area. This was a great way to inform and involve the public of how human trafficking was very much alive and well in our own city. Soon after, we partnered with Purpose Jewelry to begin a fundraising campaign. Purpose Jewelry is an organization concentrating on empowering victims of human trafficking by educating and rehabilitating. Once rescued, the women are given safe places to live and are taught valuable, enriching skills such as jewelry making. Purpose jewelry then sends you the jewelry to sell, where the profits are sent back to the women themselves to further their rehabilitation! We held two different trunk shows with Austin Catalyst, a youth group assisting the 16-24 ages in the Austin Area. At these shows we showcased the jewelry; but were also given about ten minutes to speak to the audience about what human trafficking was, and raise more awareness about the topic to a young audience. Following through the next months we concentrated on awareness campaigns by passing out fliers to local businesses and restaurants, concentrating specifically on the service industry. These fliers would have details on signs on how to recognize human trafficking (victim or trafficker). Upon giving these fliers out to businesses we would take some time to go over what human trafficking is and how to recognize the signs. We would often concentrate on businesses and restaurants located near massage parlors, hotels and other potential hot spots for human trafficking. At this point, AFP went on a brief hiatus, but I continued to work with local businesses (especially hotels) human trafficking prevention. I was often shocked at the lack of training hotel clerks had to recognize the signs of human trafficking; there were so many red flags for human trafficking that were clear to the trained eye. At this point I felt it necessary to launch an awareness campaign for the hotel industry. In response, I created a human trafficking training program specifically geared towards the hotel industry and sex slavery. The training attempts to erase many stereotypes of human trafficking victims, along with stereotypes of traffickers themselves. I tried to bring attention to different technological aspects (backpage, review sites) many may not be aware of, and how traffickers use this to their advantage. The training consists of a PowerPoint, with the first part going over the basics of human trafficking, definitions, terms, and how it affects us currently in our country. The second part goes over signs to look for as a doorman, desk clerk, concierge and even housekeeping. The third and final part is a real-life example of an alleged human trafficking case investigated in Central Texas. In this example, I go over the red flags that could have been seen starting with the online advertisement, check in, and finally signs the hotel clerk could have looked for. As of now 75 hotels have accepted our training program to be submitted! Many of the managers expressed excitement in training their staff to recognize the signs of human trafficking to join the cause. We live in a time where we have a myriad of resources at our disposal to raise awareness to the growing cancer of human trafficking. Social media, grassroots organizing, and a growing passionate generation makes it easier than ever to spread our message. Through solidarity we can finally bring awareness and end to the cancer of human trafficking. Together we can be a voice for those it has been taken from; and give back freedom to those it always belonged to.

From birth, children in the United States are given greater access to success and comfort than their counterparts in third-world countries, who are riddled with economic hardship and cultural barriers to freedom. This third-world story begins in the hands of owners, not parents. As a child enslaved to the fishing industry, the first tasks are to pull fishing nets out of the water at 3 am, to avoid being attacked by fish as large as their tiny bodies, and to work a full day. Instead of education, they experience the beatings, malnutrition, and a dark life of pain and separation. These children are not identified as people in this world; they are investments.

In 1961 the Akosombo Dam in Ghana created Lake Volta. This man-made lake is one of the largest in the world, accounting for 3.6% of the total country and demonstrating the country’s dedication to overcoming economic oppression. It supplies a massive fishing industry. Simultaneously, the lake is also home to thousands of children, both girls and boys, whose life does not extend beyond the borders of the lake and the walls of the compound they sleep in. Enslaved as young as two, they enter from the surrounding rural regions and are forced to work at the lake. Families are lied to, believing the falsehood that their children will be taken care of and will have real jobs. Most children are taken directly off the street and are shuttled across the borders at night. Still others, the victims of poverty and lack of an education, are sold into slavery knowingly by their parents, who can no longer afford to take care of them.

The pivotal pillars propping up human trafficking (poverty, lack of education, greed, corruption) remain deeply embedded across the globe. Upward economic mobility is limited by subpar educational systems combined with poverty and familial expectations, which strips third-world children of protection from violence, police brutality, and slavery. The system is not designed with escape routes; each generation further perpetuates the brokenness of the slave family or the brutal mindset of the law enforcement.

This is the system that Challenging Heights, a non-profit, enters into: they bring life and restoration into a corrupt and damaging structure. Per their tagline, they, “promote youth and family empowerment and children’s rights to education and freedom from forced labor in Ghana.” While opponents criticize many organizations for their efforts to “fix” the system with American ideals and models, Challenging Heights addresses the social issues from the perspective of the governmental policies already established in Ghana. Challenging Heights operates a school in Sankor, where they are able to serve over 700 children from high-risk trafficking areas and meet requirements for the country’s educational guidelines. In addition to educational aid, Challenging Heights works with local authorities and organizations to rescue children from the fishing industry, to rehabilitate and empower them after their rescue, and to prosecute the men who had enslaved them.

To accomplish this enormous and never-ending task, Challenging Heights needs the financial stability to maintain offices in Ghana and Washington, D.C. During the first two weeks of the 2015 summer, Gardner-Webb University’s human trafficking awareness club, Release the Captives, was approached by Challenging Heights to enter into a fundraising partnership. After months of planning and the assistance of a Historians Against Slavery Grant, we organized a benefit concert featuring the Rory Tyer Band in November 2015 to advocate for Challenging Heights. We encouraged the concert goers not only to enjoy the great musical act, but also to lend financial support to this worthy organization. This was a creative opportunity for students and community members to encounter real stories of slavery. While the event was a success, leaving a lasting impression on the audience, we learned several lessons worthy of mention to fellow justice-seeking university groups. Most importantly, remember that the audience is the central axis that any fundraiser or awareness event rotates around. We learned to understand the culture of the audience we are reaching, and this dictates marketing and logistics for the event, and implicates how successful the event can be. In considering the audience of a college campus, the timeline of student activities is crucial. Avoid busy times of the year like November, and promote as early as possible. Students need to be convinced that an event is worth their time, regardless the cause. Strive to build an event that capitalizes on the unique culture of your campus. By growing our organization through events like this, and by educating those ple around us, we can spread awareness of injustice and initiate change around the world.

For more on Challenging Heights, visit http://challengingheights.org/.

The annual 2014-2015 Human Trafficking Awareness Week at Gardner-Webb University was a success this year. In the months leading up to this weeklong event, our club wrestled with what we wanted to accomplish through our various events. Traditionally our club, Release the Captives, was simply a human trafficking awareness club. However, after some soul-searching, we decided that we wanted and needed to do more than just spread awareness. This week, we tried to get as many people as possible involved in our events, rather than just preaching at them from a street corner. We tried to make it personal.

Monday night was key for preparation, as we produced dozens of signs, posters, and banners to post around campus for the week. When selecting quotes to post around our student center, we tried to stay true to the theme of being active. We didn’t select statistics, because people don’t connect to numbers. They connect to emotions and ideas. Tuesday we finalized all of our plans for the remaining three days, organizing all of our club members to run the events.

On Wednesday during the day, we finally started with an Awareness Fair! Awareness, although something that we wish to expand past, is a necessary step to achieve activism. We set the fair up in our student center, and while Release members ran about half of the booths, the other half was run by representatives from different organizations on campus, such as the Religious Department, Civitan Club, English Department, Alpha Chi, and Campus Ministries! Incorporating other organizations on campus was an effective way to spread awareness through other avenues and approach trafficking through different perspectives, such as the Civitan’s booth on physical and mental disabilities’ relationship to trafficking.

Wednesday night we partnered with our campus’ popular a cappella group, the AcaFelons, for the first annual AcAwareness Night. At a popular coffee shop in town, the AcaFelons sang their repertoire in different sets, allowing leaders of Release to talk about trafficking and how to do something about it between sets.We collected donations from store patrons before the last set of singing to raise money for a deaf woman who is a survivor of trafficking. She lives in South Sudan and needed financial support for her schooling.

Thursday we set up a Trafficking Simulation, with two different mazes, one for labor trafficking and one for sex trafficking. The mazes weren’t hard to complete in an intellectual way, but we hoped that they would be hard to complete in an emotional way, as we included steps in each leg of the maze explaining to whoever came through directly what they would experience if they were trafficked. At the end of each maze, there was a true story that we used as models for the trafficking steps. In this way, we hoped that each person who walked through the mazes would personalize the experience in their imagination and be able to connect better to the two human beings who were trafficked and rescued.

Friday we partnered with our campus’s Resident Advisors to promote Tom’s Day Without Shoes. You may ask, “How does raising awareness about shoeless poor people help human trafficking?” Well I’m glad you asked, as after many people asked me on that day how it related, I could tell them that poverty is directly linked to trafficking. We view trafficking as a terrible moral issue, but it is also an economic one. People who are trafficked are often poor and feel like they have no other choice, financially, other than to sell their bodies to either labor or sex. We all promoted Tom’s Day by not wearing shoes, telling people why we weren’t wearing shoes, having people paint their bare feet and walk across a banner, and posting pictures of everything all over social media. We also had people sign one of two giant shoes and, if possible, donate pairs of shoes for Miracle Hills Ministries in Gaffney, South Carolina. We also had donation boxes planted in a few local churches where our members attended. By the end of the day, we collected 8 garbage bags full of shoes, which rounds out to about 240 gallons of shoes.

In setting up and conducting the events of this week, we came into direct contact with other organizations, students, businesses, and community members. Our Awareness Fair mobilized various educational departments and clubs from Gardner-Webb. The AcAwareness night gave us direct partnership with Gardner-Webb’s most public singing group, as well as one of the most popular shops in Boiling Springs. Our Tom’s Day activities coincided with Gardner-Webb’s Accepted Students Day. In 3 hours, I personally talked to probably over 200 people, including the family and friends of accepted students. Our proceeds aided education in South Sudan and poverty in South Carolina. My favorite reaction from our campus was an email that went out from Gardner-Webb Administration, directing students to put their shoes back on when inside the student center. Many of us didn’t comply.

In the next year, Release the Captives will head in the direction of activism along with awareness, and I see this Awareness Week as the first step. There was a lot of awareness, but we initiated creative and new ways (that avoided the standard of listing statistics and explaining definitions) to approach the masses. We tackled trafficking from multiple perspectives, generated some tangible resources, partnered with many different people, and stepped outside the confines of our campus. We hope to create an atmosphere of acknowledgement on our campus that permeates through the community around us. By connecting to people directly, we hope to make that awareness personal to the people who we shared with. We hope that the people from the community during AcAwareness Night and from Accepted Students Day will take home their new understanding and plant seeds throughout the region. Jasmine, a faithful member of Release, summed up this week’s goals by hoping that people were educated, and that they had “begun to have a heart for social activism.”