Making A Difference Today for a Safer Tomorrow w/ Kristi Wells

0:00 There are few things that make people successful. Taking a step forward to change their lives is one successful trait, but it takes some time to get there. How do you move forward to greet the success that awaits you? Welcome to Next Steps Forward with host Chris Meek. Each week, Chris brings on another guest who has successfully taken the next steps forward. Now here is Chris Meek. Hello, I'm Chris Meek, and you've tuned to this week's episode of Next Steps Forward. As always, it's a pleasure to have you with us.

0:41 Our special guest today is Christy Wells. Christy is a leading expert in the fight against human trafficking in the United States. She co-founded Safe House Project, a nonprofit organization combating trafficking in America in 2017. Under Christy's leadership, Safe House Project has quickly become a unifying leader of the anti-trafficking field. Safe House Project convenes more than 500 stakeholders in the Trafficking Survivor Equity Coalition. She regularly advises federal and state legislators and Fortune 500 companies to help advance a coordinated, collaborative, public-private national response to trafficking in America. Christy Wells, welcome to Next Steps Forward. Thanks for having me. No, it's a pleasure having you here. I spoke with your co-founder, Brittany, a couple years ago, and to be honest with you, my head was in the sand on human trafficking.

1:26 She really opened my eyes with a few other guests, so this is a big, big focus for me and for the show. I really appreciate you taking the time. I just shared your background in combating human trafficking. Fill in the details of your life story. I was fortunate enough to be raised by an incredible business leader and an incredible man. My dad was the CEO of a billion-dollar corporation. My mom was in the intelligence community, and so I was raised around a very interesting group of people, but really people that weren't afraid to tackle problems from a high level and weren't afraid to get their hands dirty and do the work that needed to be done, but more than anything, I was raised around people that taught me that we have a responsibility to make a difference in the world.

2:13 When I was 16 years old, I had an opportunity to go on a missions trip to Costa Rica, and while I was there, I saw children as young as six that were being sold into the commercial sex trade. I came back with my heart on fire, and my mom said, great, what are you going to do about it? I did what I could, but you go into graduating high school, and the freshman year of my college was when 9-11 happened, and the world shifted, and the focus of where we were as a country shifted, and rightfully so, to what we needed to do to protect our country.

2:56 To me, all of the evil things at that point, it was just amplified that much more that they happened overseas and that America was safe. I met my husband in December of 2001, who was in training to become a naval aviator, and so followed that trajectory and became a military spouse, and again, still seeing him go overseas and fight a foreign enemy, and that was where the bad things happened. My heart had always been for anti-trafficking efforts because of what I'd seen in Costa Rica, but then in 2017, a friend of mine went to South Africa. He was a Christian hip-hop artist, and he saw a need to build up a safe house to protect kids that were at risk of trafficking.

3:40 He came back with his heart on fire. I said, yes, absolutely, human trafficking is an evil thing that happens overseas. What can I do to help? I jumped in to help him raise money for the safe house in South Africa, and as we began doing that, people started to say, that's great, but what are you going to do here? I didn't have an answer. The only other person I knew that had understood trafficking domestically and had ever even brought it up was Brittany, my co-founder, so I went to her and said, okay, let's figure this out, and what are the needs, and what are the gaps, and are we supposed to do something? Both of us were in varying areas in corporate America, and then we saw a problem so big we couldn't unsee it, and both of our husbands deployed, leaving us with five children under the age of seven, and we launched an organization because we saw a problem that was so big that you can't walk away from it once you see it.

4:36 That's so true, unfortunately, and a lot of people are concerned about human trafficking, but very, very, very few people create nationwide nonprofits to address the crisis. You touched on your trip to Costa Rica. What creates such a strong motivator for you and for Brittany and the co-founders to go all in the way that you have? Honestly, for us, it felt like a moment when God said, go. You can't go halfway, but we saw something that was so big, and it required an all-in response. It wasn't something that you felt like anything less than all-in was going to be worthwhile, so we saw the DOJ had issued a report stating 300,000 American kids trafficked in the United States that same year, and they've since rescinded that report because it's an illegal industry.

5:27 It's really difficult to track, but that same year, the International Labor Organization issued a report stating that only 1% of victims are ever identified, and then the Counter Trafficking Data Collaborative said, and once somebody is identified, if they don't receive the quality services that they need, 80% will experience re-victimization, and we saw what we always call our waterfall of, okay, you've got this, and then you've got this amount identified, and then this amount even has the chance of preventing re-victimization. What are we doing? This is the problem of human trafficking, but from a solution standpoint, our solutions are really broken, and so that's where we started to craft what is now Safe House Project.

6:14 Why did you choose to start a new organization instead of joining an existing one? Everything that we had seen from, well, first of all, being military spouses, we move all the time, and you had really two options. One was to team up with a local organization, but then you invest into that community, and then two years later, you're moved. Four months after we launched Safe House Project, I moved from Virginia Beach to San Diego, California, and Brittany and I were coast to coast, so we laughed. We said, well, you're in Virginia Beach, and I'm in California. I guess we're a national organization, which really is comical when you look back on it, but any of the national organizations that we'd seen addressing this were D.C.-based, wasn't remote, and it wasn't the part of the problem that we felt like we were supposed to be addressing because it was this hybrid of this national perspective, but this boots on the ground collaboration, and those organizations are still around and are still great, but it was national and stretching their own agenda, and we actually felt like ours was supposed to be national but furthering a local agenda across the country, and so we didn't see anything out there that looked like that, and so we just said, I guess we're going to give this thing a shot.

7:38 Brittany was on maternity leave, by the way. Her husband, the youngest of these five children under the age of seven, was five weeks old, and Brittany was still on maternity leave from careerbuilder.com, so she really left something in the dust when we launched this. So I mentioned I was thrilled to have your co-founder, Brittany, done on just over two years ago, which I can't believe it's been two years. I know a lot has changed since then. Compare where the Safe House Project was two years ago with the work you're doing today and the alliances you now have. Wow. How long do we have? Plenty of time. Okay, so we operate in a few key buckets, and some of those have expanded, and a couple of those are new since 2022.

8:25 So on the education and prevention space, we have strived to educate communities on how to identify and respond to human trafficking. In 2020, we launched the OnWatch, which is our national platform that anybody can log onto to train them on how to identify trafficking. That is still rolling and still going. We developed in 2022, came out with a training for healthcare providers to identify and respond to human trafficking, and so that's a partnership that's been created with the Academy of Forensic Nursing. That's allowed us to increase our training capacity by the tens of thousands because we can integrate this training into healthcare systems and they can understand it into their learning management system.

9:09 And so we partnered with Ascension Health this year. That's 50,000 people that are going to be getting trained on top of the other mechanisms. And what's beautiful is that it is a self-propelled, self-paced training. And so those are the ones that don't rely on our team having to continually be out there and distribute the content. It's really something that providers are able to take that initiative on. We have a new partnership this year in training for in-home service providers. We had done one originally for pest management, but we've been asked to do one that expands out to those that are doing HVAC and propane and gas, which propane and gas I learned the other day through my new friend, the president of the American Propane Gas Association, is that these service providers go out to about 70% of farms across America.

9:58 And so that really expands the aperture of who we're able to train them to see, especially as it pertains to labor trafficking and what we're seeing happening on farms these days. And so it's really been cool to see how those efforts have continued to expand. And then as of Friday, November 1st, we closed on the acquisition of an organization called Anti-Trafficking International, who has really been an international leader in a lot of ways on prevention curriculum. And that's something that we've never developed because we had seen ATI doing it so well. But they integrate into schools to educate and do a train-the-trainer model and educate teachers on how to equip students on how to identify trafficking. And so we're really excited about that partnership and how that's going to kind of expand this portfolio of curriculums that we're able to deliver into communities.

10:49 Also, from an expansion standpoint, we help survivors exit their trafficking situation. So 2022, we helped, I think that was probably the year it was maybe about, we'll call it 50 to 100 survivors of trafficking escape their trafficking situation. And really, we weren't advertising our phone number. We weren't creating the partnerships. It was just the fact that people would go, I don't know, you guys have a really big rolodex of safe homes across the country. I can't figure out how to help this survivor. Can you help them? And our answer was always yes. And we found that we were taking, at that time, what was just the hardest of the hard cases, the ones that nobody knew what to do with. And somehow we ended up being able to, by stubbornness probably, craft a solution and figure out a place for them to go and find healing.

11:35 So that continued to expand. I was the one doing that directly. We didn't even have a program built for it. It was just, I don't know, we're just kind of doing it. We weren't even tracking the numbers. That's the reason it's big. It was just a kind of side thing that was happening. And then that was 2022. Actually, no, that was the year we probably had more than that. We had about 150 survivors. 2023, we put somebody in that role intentionally, and she served 534 survivors just by that being her sole focus. And that was a little bit of the eye-opening moment where we said, oh, heck, I think we have a program here. We should probably put some real intentional effort behind it.

12:18 And about midway through the year, we'd started doing that and really just telling her to run. Here are the financial resources that you need. You can help a survivor exit, use Uber, get them a plane ticket, put them on, decrease whatever barriers you need to, just make it happen. And so we continued to hire in order to bring extra support towards the end of 2023. This year, this year, this team has grown. We have four full-time staff, one part-time staff and four interns all dedicated to that role. And this year, this team will serve 1,500 survivors from across the country.

13:01 And last I saw, we were at 1,193, and that was a week ago. And so our phones are blowing up. We've created incredible partnerships with HSI and FBI and these law enforcement agencies that go, look, we'll go kick down doors and we'll go help people exit. But what do we do next? And if that's the biggest barrier preventing them from doing more outreach and raids and stings is trying to figure out where to put people and we can be that bridge, game on. We're going to do that all day, every day. So that's been a huge expansion. We continue to expand in the safe homes that we get to support.

13:42 That's our granting arm that allows us to fund new or expanding safe homes. So every year that's been about 100 new beds in safe homes across the country that we've been able to continue to invest in. And really for us, we do what we say, find the gaps, fund the gaps. So we identify where there's lack of access to care for those that our team is serving. So if it's those with severe mental health and they go, look, there's not enough safe homes that can take those with severe mental health or there's not enough safe homes that can take those with ADA requirements who are deaf or we're really seeing an increase there. We analyze that data and that's what we use to inform where we are putting our dollars for safe home development.

14:27 So that's continued to expand. In 2022, we launched the Trafficking Survivor Equity Coalition. All of these things are things that we go, look, I'll do anything. I'm not doing direct care and I'm not working with politics. So here we are. We lead a national coalition of over 500 stakeholders, survivors and leaders in the anti-trafficking field because we had to mobilize the local levels voices for policymakers because the Trafficking Victim Protection Reauthorization Act, which is quite a mouthful. In fact, it made it even longer. It was the Frederick Douglass Trafficking Victim Protection Reauthorization Act of 2022.

15:11 It was stuck. It was having trouble getting through the House. It had been it had passed its reauthorization time frame. So this is the federal bill that every couple of years or every about five years has to be reauthorized. And it's the thing that expands the federal provisions on the prevention of trafficking, prosecution of traffickers and buyers and the protection of victims. And it's the thing that authorizes the federal and domestic spending towards towards trafficking efforts. So it was stuck and the local, the national orgs were trying to leverage their voices to make things happen. They're having trouble. So we got a call that said, do you think you can pull together some stakeholders to make this happen?

15:55 We said, sure, we pulled out a call for support, hoping to get 40 organizations, ended up with 500, and we started a full court press with Congress. And my favorite part of that was there was one congressional member that was the final blockade and he was standing in the way and he wasn't going to even send this bill to the floor for a vote until this thing that he wanted in it was added and had nothing to do with trafficking. It was just a pet project. And it did not need to be there. And if it did go in there, then these other people were not going to let the bill go to the floor. It's politics. And so this one representative happened to be out of a community where we had significant amount of support and we mobilized those local voices.

16:44 And so he was on recess from Congress and was in the grocery store. And this woman chases him down with the grocery cart and demands to know why he is not in support of trafficking victims. And he left the grocery store, called a mutual acquaintance of ours and said, tell Safe House Project to stand down. I'll sign the bill. I'll send it on. So we have. But since then, we've taken generally much more passive approaches to to mobilizing stakeholders and legislators and really have been excited about some initiatives happening at the federal and state level and a really creative, deep partnerships there.

17:25 So that's been fantastic this year. And we've got some other things brewing as well. So I think that's the general overview of how we've expanded for the last few years. But it's been exponential growth, to say the least. So not much has happened. Not much has happened. Nope, we're super bored. Nothing going on here. And before I forget, where can people learn more about Safe House Project? Yeah, the newly developed safehouseproject.org. Terrific. What's the main driver of human trafficking? Is it purely money for sex, sex for money, or is it more complex than that? I think it's money and power. I think when you've got any of those illegal industries that have historically been there of weapons trade, drugs, what people started to realize was that you can sell a drug once, you can sell a dime bag once, you can sell a gun once, but you can sell a person over and over again. And it is a what they would call a recurring stream of revenue.

18:31 And so and then getting a replacement is easy and that's awful. But you've got the same stories that have been happening for centuries of you've got bad people looking to obtain power. And unfortunately, you've got significant demand. And where you've got demand, you're going to have supply. And the traffickers just happen to be the brokers in the middle that probably in some cases were a drug dealer at some point or did something nefarious or were their own specific breed of pedophile or perpetrator and had just when, you know, now, 15 years ago, everybody was handed a recording device in the form of a cell phone.

19:19 Even that's child sexual abuse that was happening behind closed doors that didn't have a monetary component. All of a sudden, you've got these perpetrators that realize that now they have the ability to make a dime off of the abuse that they're doing. And so it feels like the next level of a society devolving because of the demand. And you've got traffickers who are rising to meet the demand. And we continue to have a high reward, low penalty crime when we don't have legislation in place that prevents trafficking or prosecutes traffickers and buyers. As Brittany noted when she was with us, Safe House Project's mission is threefold.

20:03 For folks who weren't with us for my conversation with her, let's take them one at a time. The first priority is to increase survivor identification. What are the signs of human trafficking and are there ways that ordinary citizens can possibly spot someone who's a trafficker or being trafficked and help out? So there are 25 distinct different business models of human trafficking, and that's the thing that a lot of people don't know. And so when we talk about even the signs and indicators, I can give you the signs of what it could look like in a massage parlor. But those are going to look very different than the signs that are present in a boyfriending situation or in a familial trafficking situation. And so we developed a tool called On Watch. You can visit it at IamOnWatch.org, and that is a one hour training that equips anybody how to understand what trafficking looks like, feels like, sounds like.

20:54 And it's a variety of different business models, the most prevalent business models of trafficking. And so I encourage anybody to take the training because it's really going to open up your eyes and move past a lot of the misnomers and myths that are there on human trafficking, because I can train people to a checklist. But if I tell you to look for somebody who has sources of control over the victim and the victim isn't allowed to speak and there's multiple stages of bruising. But in your mind, trafficking is still something that only happens to those who are illegal immigrants. Then what you look for is going to be very different than a child who's meeting the same signs and indicators who's being trafficked by an uncle because the same things can be there.

21:40 But if we don't know all of the different ways it can look, then a checklist does us no good. So take the training at IAmOnWatch.org and that is the best way to understand how to identify and respond to human trafficking. Well, this seems like the perfect spot if you talk about a new technological tool called SafeWatch that SafeWatch Project is going to launch early next year. You said it's going to be a real game changer in the U.S. and how the U.S. responds to trafficking. And I know you don't say that lightly. What is SafeWatch and what will it do? I'm so glad you asked. I am so excited about this. So SafeWatch, let me take a step back. I am guessing that somebody on here has had a moment when they have seen something around human trafficking and gone, gosh, something doesn't feel right.

22:28 And I know it. I know it down to my toes, but I don't know what to do about it. Right. Or we've seen the signs in the airport that say, if you see something, say something. That people go, OK, well, what do I look for and who am I saying it to? So SafeWatch is a new tool that has been created and it is, like you said, something that is going to truly revolutionize the way the U.S. responds to trafficking because it answers the question of who do I what am I looking for and who do I say it to? So it is a user friendly app and it is designed to help you identify and report suspected trafficking situations.

23:14 And it's something that has been tested by health practitioners and psychologists and law enforcement. And it is the tool that's really going to allow community members to quickly and really discreetly share what their concerns are, to ask questions, to access support and empower them to make a difference when it comes to human trafficking. But moreover, it also allows law enforcement to respond with urgency to vetted tips. So what is this? So it's an app. It's actually it's going to have a variety of different mechanisms that it can filter the information, so multi-channel reporting. So it's going to be an app. It is going to be a chat bot on websites.

23:55 It's going to have audio features when people call in and it's going to have a text based solution. So this is a solution that is going to allow us to aggregate, to vet, to rank and to route suspected tips. So let's break that down. So aggregating, again, is that multi-channel reporting vetting. This is AI powered triage that is taking a framework that we have created. Well, we didn't create. A gentleman created it. Fascinating individual. He was I'm pretty sure he was well, he was CIA. He was a two star general and he was the chief interrogator in Vietnam. Again, fascinating individual. He also is the gentleman who built the framework for the FBI post 9-11 to identify when somebody was moving from extremist to jihadist.

24:41 So it's a predictive analysis. And so what we used was his framework. And he started working with our team two years ago to marry that technology and that kind of behavioral clustering with human trafficking, behavioral science and indicators to identify where somebody was on the perspective of being groomed to full exploitation. So. Multi-channel reporting that uses AI powered triage, so somebody is interacting with it and saying, I see something that's happening in my neighborhood, something really feels off. There's this little girl whose mom, I think, is addicted to drugs. Creepy men are kind of coming and going from the house at all hours of the night.

25:21 A little girl is always dirty. She talks about porn. She's six years old. Something doesn't feel right. It's natural language, right? It's the things that we say. But behind the scenes, what's happening is through this AI powered triage, it is marrying what we say to the signs and indicators of trafficking and it is ranking the likelihood of that situation being trafficking. Once it hits a certain threshold, it continues to gather information by interacting with the user and then says, do you want to create a tip? So right there in the app there, once they've already provided a lot of information, they can create a tip that then routes immediately to law enforcement, because this has been one of the biggest failure points up to this point with law enforcement is that they go.

26:04 Can we get a tip about a minor being trafficked in under 30 days? Simple question, and that answer should always be yes, but it's not happening. And so this tool will immediately route it to a dashboard that is accessible by dispatch to be able to see is a tip. Is there a trafficking situation happening? What is the priority level? Is there a life risk? What's the address? What's the name of the individual and see the entire chat history? And then they'll be able to assign it to a specific law enforcement division. And so law enforcement will have visibility into the tips and into who has access to it, because right now there's cross jurisdictional or there's not cross jurisdictional collaboration.

26:50 People don't want to step on toes. Nobody knows who's picked up the case. FBI might be running with it. Local PD might have it. And so there's no visibility into it. So this tool, the dashboard behind SafeWatch, is the tool that is going to allow that cross jurisdictional communication, collaboration and visibility into all of the tips that are coming through. So it is putting the power in the hands of the people in order to identify that out their suspicions on human trafficking, test it and go because the chatbot might come back and go, no, that's not human trafficking. But here are the additional signs that if these things start popping up, could be human trafficking. It's going to it reads through.

27:30 This is great. It reads through the misnomers and myths that are out there. We get calls on that all the time or have people tell me, you know, I went out to my car at the Target parking lot and there was zip ties on my windshield. And that means that I was being targeted by trafficker. No, it means somebody was screwing with you. And that's really all it is. And so it also knows those misnomers and myths that we've trained into it. And so the tips that then are getting routed to law enforcement are the ones that have gone through, again, that vetting process. So it is so right now the solution is if you suspect trafficking, call 9-1-1. And if it's a tip reported to the National Human Trafficking Hotline, this is the solution that will take over that process and really make sure that there is a comprehensive system across the US.

28:21 It also is going to work with state hotlines because a lot of those have been created because of the failure points of the National Human Trafficking Hotline. So they've said, fine, we're going to create our own. So all of this is designed to integrate within existing systems and really bolster their current response. It's so great. You're not too excited, are you? Not excited at all. I mean, this is fascinating. And then, like you said, game changer. What inspired the Safe House Project's leaders, you, Brittany, and others, to undertake such a massive challenge to develop an entirely new technology? Well, I'm not going to lie when the, and I will not take credit where my credit is not due.

29:02 When this fabulous individual, this two-star general, Bruce Lawler, came to us and talked about everything and he pulled up his charts and his graphs and his behavioral clustering and word mapping. My co-founder's eyes got big and she was giddy because it was data. And I said, fantastic. You two have fun. I'm out. And so I exited stage left and left them to work through this because honestly, for me, it felt too big. And I'm okay to say that. Tackling a problem this significant with something that's never been done just didn't feel possible. But I watched them as they've tested this in schools.

29:43 And it was really the audacity to think that we could pull something off came when we met a gentleman who is now leading all of our technology infrastructure development and all of this. And he understands AI at a level that we don't. And we said, hey, we've got this thing that she's been creating over here. Here's a theory. Can you do this? And we'd met somebody else who gave us the words natural language processing. Didn't even know fully what that was. But my mom always taught me stick your head up your chest out and act like you know what you're doing. And so that's exactly what we did. And so we've got this guy over here who's and Brittany and he had been testing this for two years.

30:24 We've got this idea of natural language processing because you can't train everybody to know all of these words that are over here. Is there a way to marry the two? And his answer was simply yes. And he said, well, do you have all of these things that we could load into the system? And so Brittany loaded it in and we began testing it. And it was when we saw the responsiveness of the system within minutes that was providing answers that we never in a million years would have expected it was possible to do. And so it was when we started to really understand the capabilities of AI and how that could be leveraged that we said we should give this a go.

31:10 And so really started putting a lot of intentional time and effort in testing. And we have had amazing technologists come behind us. We've got a gentleman in Tel Aviv who's building the dashboards and somebody in Germany who's building the some of the other tech and somebody in Atlanta who's building the app. And these technologists who have come alongside and said, I see what you're doing and I want to be part of it. And our technology integrator has been the driving force in this where he's invited them to into this journey and said, it's fine. You can take as long as you need to. But for every day you delay, a life is being missed, being saved. That's lit a fire under all of them to get things done rapidly.

31:53 And so it's been incredible to see their heart and their commitment and their passion and how quickly these things are being developed with integrity. Earlier, you mentioned some of the challenges you face by coordinating local, state, federal law enforcement. How much the difficulty in combating trafficking has been an uncoordinated or inconsistent response to tips and the lax prosecution of traffickers? Yeah, absolutely. We see this happen, play out with cases all across the country where we've got the same trafficking victim that will show up in a hospital in Baltimore. And then she's, you know, with her trafficker who's kidnapped her. And now she's in jail in Arizona because she, you know, what they considered a domestic violence incident.

32:43 Now she's somewhere in California. And so we see these things play out and go, well, why don't you know, because we'll we'll track with these survivors and say, OK, well, you're in Arizona. Why can't you get the hospital records or the police records of what the FBI was involved? We surely they know what's happening there. And they go, oh, we don't we don't actually know how to do that or we don't do that or that's going to take too long or we can make that request and it takes forever. And so we see a lot of these opportunities for cases to be built, even at a federal level, that are missed because of a lack of cross-jurisdictional collaboration and information sharing.

33:26 And so we've always been told, gosh, if there was just a system that allowed us to really query all of the different human trafficking cases across America, it would make it so much easier. But we weren't technologists. We weren't law enforcement. And so we tried to really stay in our own lane and go, OK, surely somebody in the technology space or the law enforcement space is going to figure this out. And it wasn't happening. And so that's where we decided to really say, OK, let's let's figure this out and how can we do these things? But that lack of communication, lack of ability to build cases cross-jurisdictionally is the thing that has resulted in low prosecution rates because it's difficult in the defund the police movement that came out post-COVID.

34:16 A lot of those task forces were disbanded and a lot of the funding that would be in there for vice units and those kind of things to focus on human trafficking, that went away. And so they've got to be law enforcement is already on resource constraints anyways. And if you're throwing everything across the fence to say, hey, here, this is a tip and this is a tip and this is a tip and we're expecting them to investigate all of it, that's also not fair to them. But they do need the resources to be able to to vet out suspected trafficking and the resources to be able to go after it and the laws to be able to prosecute it. And for judges to be able to prosecute.

34:58 And so there's there's been a lot of lack, but the hope and the intention is SafeWatch will bubble up a really significant need. This is going to get worse before it gets better because communities are going to be seeing more trafficking because now those suspicions that are never turned into tips are going to start filtering into the system. We're going it's going to get worse before it gets better because we're going to see a bigger problem and we're going to see more than one percent of the issue. But our hope is that that is our intention is to help create the business case for law enforcement to ask for more resources to get more support to push legislators to make stronger legislation, because now we're seeing the problem.

35:39 You can't solve a problem you can't see in one percent victim identification is not going to be the thing that moves the nation to respond. And that's a great segue to my next question. You talked about data. If accurate and actionable information has been the Achilles heel in combating human trafficking, why isn't someone else, especially the federal government, stepped up sooner? Million dollar question. That's a fantastic question. My two cents, I don't know that I have a fantastic answer for that, but my two cents is they're too slow. I don't think that there's people who lack innovation, but I think you're dealing with bureaucracy. You're dealing with some of these roles that are changing every four years with administration.

36:24 They can barely get started before the rug is pulled out from under them. Initiatives get funded and then swept under the rug with the change of administration. I've seen federal grants that have come out of we're going to do this and we want to do a think tank in order to solve this problem. But the people given that grant, by the time they work to solve that problem and the next administration comes in and they go, I'm not using that data. No, that's flawed or that's, you know, focused on a specific agenda. And so there's I think there's things like that that we see happening as well. But it's politics being politics playing out across a variety of different departments. But our job is to solve the problem.

37:08 But that's where we see our space at Safe House Project, and we want to do it as fast as possible. And so we have not settled into this like it's a career. I don't want fighting trafficking to be a career. It's a mission. And when we for us, where we've shifted that mindset is. Why would we wait three years to do something we can figure out in six months? Why would we not put a full court press behind it, launch something and be able to see what it can do to move on to the next thing? And so I think I think some people have settled in and not done it because it feels too hard. I think some people have tried and have had the rug swept out from underneath them.

37:50 And I think some people don't care. I mean, I think it's that this is a it's again, it's a career, not a mission. And that's that's the problem on some of these. You know, that's a great point you make in your career versus mission. You've seen a lot as you've built Safe House over the last several years. How do people in the fight like yourself, like Brittany, how do you cope with what you've seen personally? We've seen the worst of the worst. We do. And there have absolutely been spaces, especially early on, where there was a lack of compartmentalization. There was a lack of boundaries. There were, you know, those things would seep into every part of our world.

38:37 I think we channel it better now when we see those things. Yes, you see the worst of humanity, but we've gotten bold enough that now when we see these problems, we go, fine, how do we fix it? We get mad enough to try to find a solution, whereas before it just felt dismal. We were too small. The problem was too big. And when you're dumb enough to have a lot of crazy ideas and then some of those crazy ideas start working and you go, well, huh, well, if that worked to solve that problem, maybe we can come up with another idea to solve this problem.

39:18 And so I think it's the audacity of hope that keeps us going and keeps us moving forward, because otherwise this issue will just swallow you whole. Like your mother said, you lift your head up, stick your chest out and fight on. That's exactly it. I love it. I love it. Let's go back to the watch. How will SafeWatch be put in service? Will there be a limited rollout, training? Yeah, so we are doing a multi-phase approach and we are doing testing, so we will be applying for a federal contract to see where we can go in and implement this, because we do believe it needs to be implemented at a federal level, but more than that, we are also beginning the conversations with states and so states will be able to bring this in as part of the rollout.

40:12 So we have a license to basically augment or stand up hotline solutions, so some states have nothing, some states have been moving forward. We are in conversations with Florida this last week where they've created a hotline, but they're still having that trouble of figuring out how to vet and route the tips. They can aggregate them through by promoting the phone number, but they recognize where there's opportunities for improvement. And so it's coming in in collaboration and partnership with these states and everything that we do is built on collaboration. So we are not looking to be this big org that comes in and says, we're here to solve all your problems.

40:55 No, we have to hear from the stakeholders, learn from them and really collaborate with them. So looking at doing a rollout across Florida, but from a marketing standpoint, where's my list? There's because the other piece to this is how do you get this in everybody's hands? You know, the data is only as good as what's being fed into it. And so how do you really get people using the app? And so there's groups like Extended Stay America, the hotel chain that we've worked with their C-suite for a long time, and they really deeply care about this issue. And so if we can start putting stickers in hotel rooms where exploitation might be happening, where they can download the app, looking at the rollout across Florida, looking at the rollout across health care systems that we are talking to that want to see this integrated with their health care system or health care staff.

41:49 Working on rollouts for really large sporting venues where you can reach hundreds of thousands of people at a time. And so and then leveraging our partnership with the hospitality industry with there's so many different industries that Safe House Project has worked with over the years. And so the rollout is also going to come by equipping them, because they've always said, look, I care, but what do I do? How do I see it? How do I report it? How do I vet out if I'm not sure what's happening? These are questions we've been getting for eight years. And so now it's us coming back with a solution to them to say, hey, this is the thing that we can start doing together.

42:33 And we are so excited to start those partnerships because their word has started to get out that we're doing this is the first podcast I'm doing that I'm actually putting these things out publicly. Fantastic. So it's going to certainly come across as shots fired across the valve. But really, our heart is to just say, how can we do this better? Because if we ever get to the point that we say we've been in this for 20 years and this is as good as it's going to get, then we're failing. And we're our organization just refuses to do that. I mean, the excitement you have about this right now is just jumping through the screen. And I love it. I love the fire. I love the passion. You know, first of all, when's the expected rollout target date?

43:15 January. It is January. Okay, so make sure you, me and Brittany are coordinated so we can help get the word out there as well. Social media, all that fun stuff with the network here. Let me just ask you a random question. You look back to 2017 when you started this, did you ever think you'd be here? I know the answer is yes, but. So the week that we decided to say go, I was in Charlotte and my whole day had gotten hijacked. I had an entire lineup of variety of meetings.

43:56 Every one of them got canceled. And my friend, the hip hop artist, called me and he said, I have somebody I need you to meet. And I said, well, fantastic, because my entire day just got canceled. So I ended up sitting in the backyard of this guy, never met before, in a dodgy neighborhood in Charlotte. Drug deals happening two doors down, thinking with my daughter in tow, thinking what in the world am I doing here? And we talked for a while and talked about, you know, launching an organization and talked about South Africa. And he looks at me and he goes, I had a conversation last night that I thought was for me and it wasn't, it was for you.

44:41 And he said, let me tell you a story about a woman I met last night. And she's the woman who turned the NFL pink. And he goes on to tell me about how he'd met Nancy Komen the night before. And she was telling him about when she, in the 80s, when her sister, Susan, was diagnosed with breast cancer, New York Times wouldn't even print the words breast cancer. And it was too taboo. Nobody wanted to talk about it. And when her sister died, she looked at her and said, I will make sure that everybody knows about this issue. And so she, like me, had access to very interesting people in her world, just by nature of, you know, family connections.

45:23 And she went to Jerry Jones and said, I want, I want to put pink material in your, in your gift shop. And he said, I think you're crazy. But sure, give it a try. And it sold out almost immediately. And they tried this for a while, but she was local, she was in Dallas. And so they just continued to support her through the Cowboys. But because of a woman who had the audacity to believe that something could be different and had a fire in her belly. Now, 20, 30 years later, the NFL turns pink. And so that was one of the things that was planted in our hearts early on was just sometimes crazy ideas can, if you keep pushing them forward, can change the course of history.

46:10 Look at how many people's lives have been saved because of the work of Susan G. Komen. And so, again, we're we have the audacity of hope. And so when that was the vision was how do you become the Susan G. Komen of anti-trafficking, not because we were looking to build the aircraft carrier of an organization that that is, but how do you create that impact? In fact, we also felt like we were called to be a speedboat, not an aircraft carrier. So we were supposed to move fast. We were supposed to be nimble. We weren't supposed to build something that felt so immovable. We were supposed to continue to push forward and innovate. And so those were the things that were spoken into us really early on, really before we were ever even a thing.

46:54 And so did I know we'd be here exactly? No. But did I know that we were called to do something so much bigger than ourselves and not back down and not back off? We knew that if that was the fire in our belly and that was the direction we were headed, that whatever it was was going to be big. We just didn't know what it was going to look like. A mission, not a career. Exactly. I never knew that story about the Komen Foundation. Isn't that awesome? It's fascinating. And I'm a little biased because I'm a huge Cowboys fan, as my listeners and viewers know. So I'm glad to hear that Jerry Jones did that. One of the better moves he's made recently, I guess.

47:35 You know, human trafficking is such a massive industry. Is there any way, no matter what we do, that's ever going to be eradicated? Audacity of hope. I think that for us, we have boldly and repeatedly, against everybody's judgment, put out that our goal is to see human trafficking eradicated in America by 2030. We do that over and over and over again. And every time we do, somebody comes to us and goes, you know, you kind of look like idiots when you put it out there. That's a really crazy thing. Why don't you just say something different? And my answer is always the same.

48:15 What should my goal be? To minimize it? To reduce it? To, you know, shave it by 30%? No. The goal is eradication because if that's our North Star and that's what we're guiding towards, then we're always pushing. We're always striving. Will we see trafficking eradicated in America in our lifetime? I don't know. But all I know is that myself and the entire Safe House Project team is going to do everything that we can. But it's never a statement of what we believe we can do as one organization. This issue isn't going to be eradicated by one individual, one organization, one group of people.

48:59 That statement, that we want to see trafficking eradicated in America by 2030, is a battle cry. Because it's going to take everybody on board to make this happen. And so I do think that if we are all focused in the same direction and pointing our guns at the same evil, then, yeah, I think that anything is possible. We're on board. Fantastic. We have just a few minutes left. Take us to the end of our conversation with advice or help our audience be more empowered as we deal with the crisis of human trafficking. And what gives you hope? What gives us hope are the survivors that we serve. When we have the second survivor we ever helped escape spoke at our gala here in Charlotte a few weeks ago.

49:48 And I know where she was when we met her. And I know the fear. And I remember the phone call the night that her trafficker had found her and attacked her. And she was three quarters naked in her car in the hospital parking lot and cut and everything else. And I remember that. And then I got to see her standing on the stage months away from graduating from college, happy and healing. And yes, there is so much trauma. But when we get to see the survivors and we get to see that post-traumatic growth is possible, then it continues to fuel our fire.

50:33 Because we see survivors every day that are struggling and they don't believe that they are worthy of anything. And when we know that we have the ability to step in and believe in enough for them or believe in them enough for themselves so that eventually they get to the point that they believe in themselves, then it's incredible. But what gives us hope is the survivors that we see. We've gotten to see them get married. We've gotten to see them get their first jobs. We've gotten to see their excitement when they go to the grocery store and they pick out their own food for the first time instead of what their trafficker told them that they could or could not have. We get to see them on their first paycheck. And there are all of these different things that you just go, how can I not have hope?

51:20 Because every single one of them has dignity and value and worth as a human being and as a child of God and not as a commodity. And so when we get to be a part of reminding them of that and then we get to see them figure that out for themselves, that's the miracle that we will never walk away from. Christy Wells, co-founder of the Safe House Project, thank you so much for being with us today. Thank you for your passion and commitment to eradicating human trafficking. It is my honor. It's truly my greatest honor. I'm Chris Meek. Right at time. We'll see you next week. Same time, same place. Until then, stay safe and keep taking your next steps forward.

52:00 Thanks for tuning in to Next Steps Forward. Be sure to join Chris Meek for another great show next Tuesday at 10 a.m. Pacific Time and 1 p.m. Eastern Time on The Voice America Empowerment Channel. This week, make things happen in your life. Next Steps Forward