Please contact Meesh Gapinski for more information at sesmicgap@gmail.com or 801.209.2266

When Dr. Williard first approached me about getting involved with the FREE Project, I

was unsure how I would be able to help. As a (relatively) uneducated student surrounded by

people with PhDs, I felt as if any contribution of mine would be somewhat irrelevant. Despite

this, I tried earnestly to apply myself at our early meetings, where we discussed our mission,

goals, and definitions of unfreedom. What amazed me as early as our first meeting, was the

interdisciplinary approach my professors had in mind for the FREE Project. Our meetings were

focused on a diverse dialogue rather than dominated by academia, making the conversation more

accessible for everyone.

By creating this diverse and approachable atmosphere, I was able to join in a

conversation about contemporary unfreedom that wasn’t limited to just chattel slavery or sex

trafficking. Rather, by speaking about slavery’s legacies alongside contemporary slavery, it

became clear to me that all forms of unfreedom feed off of one another, and are kept alive by

systemic powers within legislature and social structures. Through those early meetings I began to

understand how connected we are to modern slavery, and how everyone has a part to play in

modern emancipation.

In November we had our debut FREE project event, where four professors and I

introduced our concepts of contemporary slavery and its role in society. While I focused on debt

bondage among migrant workers in the garment industry in South Asia, my biggest emphasis

was on the role students have to play. Due to of our age and economic standing, most students

feel rather powerless when it comes to combating global injustice. But because young adults,

particularly women, spend the most per-capita on clothing, our spending habits actually have a

tremendous impact on the market. By reject unethically-made clothing, clothing stores such as

H&M and Zara will have no choice but to start being more transparent with their manufacturing

process, leading to a safer environment for their workers abroad.

Whitney included this image in her recent Free Project presentation about slavery in the garment industry.

While I was happy with my presentation, what blew me away the most about that initial

event was the variety of topics our speakers covered. One topic that hit home to me was

unfreedom in the sex-trafficking industry. The pervasiveness of victim-blaming and the

objectification of women allows for the continuation of rape-culture and sex-trafficking in our

nation. Young women, particularly young women of color, are taken advantage of and then

shunned by the populous for the work they were coerced or forced to do. This is particularly a

problem in Minnesota, where the Mall of America is a leader in trafficking young girls.

Despite the relevance of sex-trafficking and debt-bondage, my favorite part of that initial

event was the commentary on the legacy of slavery in America. In a time where the words

“Black Lives Matter” represent a controversial topic, I found our focus a striking reminder as to

why our African American communities are speaking up. Just because traditional slavery has

been abolished for many years, doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot of resentment and institutionalized

oppression left to sift through. America has a long way to go before becoming a place where “all

men are created equal,” and it is organizations like the FREE Project that help bring that fact to light.

I am thankful be a part of the FREE Project at St. Thomas, because so rarely do I come

across a club as diverse and interdisciplinary as this one. Because of the range of perspectives

present at each meeting, I feel as though I am truly getting the well-rounded experience that

liberal arts colleges like mine intend. By bringing so many voices together, I feel like we have

the ability to actually change something. Perhaps for now our impact will be only in Minnesota,

but I can see a future where the FREE Project at St. Thomas impacts people all over the country

by bringing us together under a common cause–to abolish modern slavery.

On Saturday, October 10, 2015, the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. hosted an important and energizing event in the history of antislavery in the 21^st century.  Stacy Jewell Lewis, a survivor of 2 years’ worth of being trafficked as a sex slave, staged her powerful play, “7 Layers Captive,” to a packed hall that night.  I represented Historians Against Slavery at this event and spoke to a VIP reception beforehand.  HAS stalwart John Donoghue and his wife Laura, along with a variety of other anti-trafficking activists (such as friend of HAS Shamere McKenzie),were also in attendance.  Some of them were more accustomed than John and I to being seated in the VIP section!

At the reception, I emphasized how Stacy’s play falls in the grand abolitionist tradition of escaped slaves telling their own stories.  She is the writer, director, producer, and star of the show, which along with the lack of some major sponsor allows her to keep control of how she tells her own story.  There will be no repeat with Stacy of nineteenth-century white abolitionists trying to shape how former African-American slaves told their stories.

And how Stacy chose to tell her story that night illustrated perfectly how vitally both historians and other activists need to be informed and inspired by survivors’ voices.  At the heart of the play’s narrative is an analysis of the psychological chains by which modern traffickers enslave their victims.  It struck both me and John that historians studying past slavery and slave resistance could benefit enormously from contemplating how this process works today.  And from this theme to its instructive illustrations of how greed drives sex trafficking and its forays into the history of madams, the play also has much to teach modern antislavery activists.  The play as staged that night (Stacy adapts the performance to the venue and audience every time she performs it) ended with a surprise moment of spiritual redemption rather than physical freedom.  So from beginning to end, audiences can learn and feel the dividends that come from a survivor telling her own story in her own way.

Students from Adrian College and Gettysburg College at Underground Railroad Freedom Center

This weekend, Free Project student-activists from Adrian College’s Not for Sale and Gettysburg College’s Free the Slaves attended & participated in the 2015 Historians Against Slavery Conference at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, Ohio. This conference at brings together scholars and activists to discuss how we can use slavery to help make slavery history.

Adrian College students participated on a panel exploring how empathy plays a role in the classroom, on their campus, and in their community. Specifically, they discussed using the games of Reacting to the Past, which assigns students the roles of historically important persons to explore the complicated and conflicting ideas that structure our society.

Adrian College students sharing about their fair-trade campus initiative

Additionally, Adrian students shared their experience fighting to make their campus fair-trade, a struggle that is difficult, ongoing, but gaining momentum. (Stayed tuned for more on Adrian College’s experience!)

Gettysburg College students took in a number of panels exploring abolition past and present, something they engaged with personally during their own conference, “The Unfinished Work,” earlier this year. We at Historians Against Slavery were thrilled to have the students at the conference, because it is they — it is YOU — that will make the biggest difference in making slavery history.

Join Stacy Jewell Lewis as she tells her story through drama at a performace of 7 Layers Captive. From the play’s website: “Using the power of music, poetry, and stunning visuals, 7 Layers Captive exposes the psychological programming that takes place in sex trafficking. Highlighting the 19th century propaganda of prostitution and how it influences this 21st century scourge, 7 Layers Captive creates a powerful blend of both historical facts and a true story of a modern-day survivor.”

For Free Project chapters in the DC-area, this would be a great event to attend with your members.

7 Layers Captive will take place in the Terrace Theater of the iconic Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, October 10th at 7pm. Get your tickets now, and join us for what will be an exciting, moving, and inspiring event!

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.”

In comparison, our meek little club of 16 dedicated members seems like it is no match for the 27 million slaves that are being held captive across our world. However, our members are not threatened or belittled by such statistics. One of the quotes we continually remind ourselves of is from Margaret Mead. Her quote reads that one should “never underestimate the power of a small group of committed people to change the world. In fact, it is the only thing that ever has.” So, with each and every passionate member, we continually calibrate our diverse talents and creativity to put on a number of events every school semester.

Every semester, our events are different and every year they get bigger and spread awareness to more and more people. In the fall semester of 2014, Release hosted a total of three events. We prepared a booth at Gardner-Webb’s club fair to inform others of our intentions and encourage those who were interested to join our weekly meeting. At these weekly meeting we plan our next event, enjoy each other’s company, and educate ourselves on current events involving human trafficking. After the club fair, we planned and prepared to have our own float in Gardner-Webb’s homecoming parade. After decorating colorful posters weeks in advance, we put together our float and rode around Boiling Springs NC to raise awareness about the need to end human trafficking. Our theme for the float was ‘Shine A Light On Slavery’ and our bright display did just that, we shined a light on the issue of human trafficking. After these two successful events, we hosted the largest event that Release has put on to date. We invited Majesty Rose, a former American Idol contestant, to perform a concert on campus and raise money for a local organization that fights trafficking called Justice Ministries (based in Charlotte NC). We gained around hundreds of dollars for Justice Ministries and gained a number of supporters within the process.

This semester, Release has already showed off a delightful display of our club at the campus’ club fair. Currently, we are creating ways to spread awareness on campus during the national EndIt Movement on February 27^th. After that event, we are hosting our biggest event during the spring semester called Human Trafficking Awareness Week. That week we will host a number of events including the Rave to Save, a Stand for Freedom bonfire, a tour of some of our local fair trade companies, human trafficking fair, and an open mic night. These are our most attended events during the school year and we’re excited to see the outcome of it this year. In April, we are hoping to raise money to attend one of HAS’s national conferences. There we will connect with other organization like ourselves and gain new ideas on how to expand and promote our club’s mission.

All in all, Release is an outstanding club fueled by passion, dedication, and a deep desire to bring justice to the nations. Check us out on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/GWUrelease and Instagram @GWU_Release. Continue following our newly founded blog @gwureleaseclub.wordpress.com