281 – Why Change Your Name, with Jeremy Vallerand

Ending Human Trafficking Podcast

Sandie is joined by Jeremy Vallerand, CEO and President of Atlas Free. Formerly Rescue Freedom International, Atlas Free is leading the charge to discover, connect, and grow the global network of anti-human trafficking organizations.

Jeremy Vallerand

Jeremy Vallerand is the CEO & President of Atlas Free, a global non-profit organization working in over 20 countries to prevent, combat, and end sex trafficking and exploitation. His Tedx Talk – “Using Your Passions to Fight Injustice” – encourages people to leverage their own skills and passions to improve the world around them. He has an undergraduate degree in Business from Trinity Western University in British Columbia, Canada and a graduate degree in Diplomacy from Oxford University in the UK. Jeremy lives in Seattle, WA with his wife, Maren, and their three children.

Key Points

• Atlas Free started with the idea to vet and connect international organizations combatting human trafficking with U.S. communities and supporters, and vice versa.
• “Rescue” does not capture the work and role that survivors play in their own recovery from human trafficking.
• Atlas Free looks as being “heroic” as sacrificing your time and resources to give agency back to those being served.
• Atlas Free’s (formerly Rescue Freedom International) vision is to rebrand their organization to recognize the need for a global atlas, a global network, to address human trafficking.

Resources

• Atlas Free

• Using your passions to fight injustice | Jeremy Vallerand | TEDxKirkland

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Transcript

Dave [00:00:00] You’re listening to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast. This is episode number 281, Why Change Your Name, with Jeremy Vallerand.

Production Credits [00:00:08] Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Dave [00:00:28] Welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast. My name is Dave Stachowiak.

Sandie [00:00:33] And my name is Sandie Morgan.

Dave [00:00:36] And this is the show where we empower you to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference in ending human trafficking. Sandie, I’m so glad for us to welcome today another guest expert who’s going to help us to really expand our horizons and to challenge us in some new ways as well. Jeremy Vallerand is the CEO and president of Atlas Free, a global nonprofit organization working in over 20 countries to prevent combat and sex trafficking and exploitation. His TEDx Talk, “Using Your Passions to Fight Injustice,” encourages people to leverage their own skills and passions to improve the world around them. He has an undergraduate degree in business from Trinity Western University in British Columbia and a graduate degree in diplomacy from Oxford University. Jeremy lives in Seattle with his wife Marin and their three children. Jeremy, welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast.

Jeremy [00:01:32] Thanks so much for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Sandie [00:01:34] And Jeremy, you and I have known each other for so many years. I think the first friend that we had in common was Dick Foth, who as a child, I grew up in the shadow of his leadership and have always admired him as a mentor.

Jeremy [00:01:52] Yeah, yeah. He’s one of my favorite human beings. And he was also the founding board chair of Atlas Free, so.

Sandie [00:01:58] Oh, well, that’s exciting. Well, let’s jump into this. So first of all, just a little bit about your background. How did you get involved in the whole anti-human trafficking movement? It doesn’t sound like that is something that would have come about in your normal everyday business agenda.

Jeremy [00:02:23] Yeah. So, as you kind of hinted at I was on kind of the business trajectory, I sort of assumed that that was where I was going to go with my life. And always had thought and was kind of grew up in a home with a family that taught whatever you do, that kind of the core of who are called to be as followers of Jesus is to use whatever resources and influence we have to advocate for the marginalized, the vulnerable and the oppressed. And so that was kind of woven into my DNA as a kid growing up in our family. My whole life, we had different people living with us, people who were in need; refugees. It just seemed like our house was kind of this revolving door of ways that my parents were trying to support people who needed help in a time of need. And so I kind of thought, oh, I’ll go on the business track, and if I’m successful, then I can use those resources for a cause that I care about. And I wasn’t sure what that cause was going to be. But you mentioned Dick Foth. Dick Foth was a mentor of mine as well. And about 15 years ago he was going on a trip to India. He had spent part of his childhood there and he wanted to go back to India and kind of retrace his childhood steps. And so he invited me to tag along. And at the time, I was still single, wasn’t married, didn’t have kids. And so I could do spontaneous things like jump on a plane and go to India. And so Dick and I were traveling India together and at the tail end of the trip, he said, You know, I have these friends that have been rescuing kids out of brothels, mostly in Mumbai, and I’d love to spend our last day with them. What do you think? And so, you know, I was kind of tagging along. So he went and we went into Kamithapura, which at the time was one of if not the largest red light district in the world. And for me, as a small town kind of country kid from outside of Seattle, grew up in a pretty quiet farm town, farm and logging town. Human trafficking was not somethingI was really familiar with at the time. And seeing one of the largest red light districts in the world, it kind of turned my world upside down. And so from there, we went a couple of hours outside the city and visited a few safe houses, mostly for kids that had come out of that red light area. And that’s really when I just knew that, okay, if to whatever extent I have success or resources, this is the cause I want to advocate for. This is what I want to be involved with. So that was kind of the moment that started the journey.

Sandie [00:04:42] And then you started a nonprofit. Tell us about that.

Jeremy [00:04:48] Yeah, so it was a few years. The first thing I did when I came back, I started telling all my friends about what I saw. I came back and was telling everyone about trafficking in India, and it wasn’t long before a friend was like, Well, if you care about this issue, you really should go meet the lead detective in Seattle who works on local trafficking cases. I was like, wait, what? What do you mean local? Like, it’s happening here in Seattle. And so I went and met with the detective and he started educating me about Seattle. And then another person said, Well, there’s this survivor that’s amazing, that’s been working in Seattle, and she was trafficked here. But now she’s leading this organization that works with women and children, and it’s unbelievable. And so I met with her, and that totally blew my mind. And so, I felt like I was getting sucked into this vortex of action and so started learning more about the issue. And that summer I was leading a climb with another buddy up Mount Rainier. One of my hobbies growing up was climbing mountains, and we had planned this climb for the 4th of July. And it was just a climb for fun with a group of friends. And about two weeks before the climb, we were doing our last training climb. And I was driving to the trailhead to meet the group. And I sort of had this moment where I thought, you know what? What if we turned this climb into a campaign to raise money to fight human trafficking? I’ve just been learning all about it. It’s this huge issue. I found out it was the fastest growing criminal enterprise on the planet and that there were more people in slavery today than any other time in history. And so it was actually the first step was turning this climb into a campaign to fight human trafficking. And it ended up raising way more money than we thought. And then a bunch of other friends reached out and said, Well, hey, when’s the next climb? When is the next climb to fight human trafficking? We called it climb for captives. And so all of a sudden people are saying, well, can we do a climb for captives? We want to help fight. And so all of a sudden we’re like, well, I guess we got to organize another climb. And so at first we were just raising money and each climb we would try to support a different anti-trafficking organization. The folks that I had been with in India, the home there, they didn’t have a mechanism in the U.S. of a 501c3 nonprofit at the time where I could send the money, all their funding was coming through churches. And so, you know, I was raising money in the business community and people needed a a nonprofit that they could look up online and make sure it was legit. And so I was trying to figure out, well man, I can’t support them. So we had to pick a different nonprofit and everybody kept recommending this one nonprofit that they said was amazing. And so we funded another nonprofit. And then that nonprofit vanished in a bit of a scandal. And the home that we had supposedly funded never happened. And so that was part of this journey where I started being like, okay, well, you know, this organization that was supposedly vetted over here that we funded that vanished, the one that was amazing that I visited, they didn’t have a nonprofit. And as we were raising money, people from around the world started reaching out through different friends and connections, saying, hey, we heard you’re raising money. Well, we know this amazing organization in Thailand or in India or in different parts of the world, but they don’t have a U.S. nonprofit. They don’t have a way to raise money. But would you consider supporting them or maybe even setting up a nonprofit for them in the U.S.? And that was when some of these light bulbs started going off that eventually, four years later, led to launching a nonprofit. So essentially what we saw was all over the world, there were already people giving their lives to fight human trafficking, but many of them didn’t have a way to raise support in the U.S. and people in the U.S. didn’t have a way to vet those organizations to know which ones were legitimate, which ones were not, how do we support them if they don’t have a nonprofit? At the same time, we started funding U.S. organizations, and there were some really great ones at the time, but many of them were trying to fight human trafficking internationally by recruiting Americans to move overseas and go to language school and, you know, put their kids in international school, which is super expensive. And we started saying, well, okay, if human trafficking is the fastest growing criminal enterprise on the planet, I don’t think we can scaleably tackle it just by recruiting Americans to go to places where they don’t know the language and they don’t know the culture to go fight human trafficking. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with that. In fact, we have some great examples of times that’s worked incredibly well. It’s just not scalable. And at the same time, if it’s true that all over the world, God’s already raised people up who are literally giving their lives day in and day out to do this work, they just don’t have a mechanism to engage in the U.S. and people in the U.S. don’t have a mechanism to engage with them. What if we could create an organization whose job was to scour the globe and find the best programs, find what’s already working, connect them together as part of a community, and bring funding and resources and connection and community together to create a united front. And so that was sort of the premise that ultimately led to in January of 2012, us launching the organization.

Sandie [00:09:23] And tell us the name of that organization.

Jeremy [00:09:26] Yeah. So when we launched, we launched as Rescue Freedom International.

Sandie [00:09:30] So let’s, let’s walk through this a little slower now because I’ve watched for years the movement and people know from listening, if they’ve been listening for a long time to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast, even our name is in a movement approach: ending. We’re not claiming we can end it, we’re not making grandiose statements. And so the challenges with using the word rescue are just legion. And so I want to talk about what you know about using the word rescue, how you began to understand that it was time to make a change. So what do you know about the word rescue, Jeremy?

Jeremy [00:10:23] Yeah, that’s a great question. Well, obviously “Rescue” was the lead word in our name. And so it was very much front and center. And when we launched our name was very literal: Rescue Freedom International. For us, when we launched, we were mostly focused on working with children with safe houses around the world that were focused on getting children out of exploitation and then seeing them thrive in freedom. And so our name was very literal at the time. We wanted to see people go from rescue to freedom. But, you know, a couple of things we saw. One thing early on, my background is in marketing and business and branding. And so we did all these kind of brand studies with different supporters. And what we found was rescue was the word that resonated the most. People really resonated with this idea of, Oh, I can do something to be involved in helping set somebody free. And so they wanted to be a part of rescue. And I think that’s one of the reasons why this term has been used and maybe misused and overused for years and years in the space is because it invites people into an action where they feel like they can be a part of changing somebody’s life. And–

Sandie [00:11:33] Well, it’s kind of like walking by a house that’s burning and this sense of urgency. And I’m here and I can do something. It’s very empowering for the rescuer.

Jeremy [00:11:46] Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. But what we started to realize as the work grew, and especially as we began to expand beyond working with just children, a lot of times children don’t have a lot of agency in their exploitation. And so rescue is often a very accurate term to describe what it takes for law enforcement officials or for family members or for social workers and organizations to be involved in getting young children out of exploitation. That that often does fit what sort of we would envision as rescue. The challenges as the work grew and we began to work with more and more adults. We began to hear from these adults that rescue didn’t feel like the accurate term to capture what it took for them to escape, because in many instances, most people around the world are not held in trafficking, as you well know, by literal bars and chains. That wouldn’t be a very scalable way for traffickers to exploit if traffickers had to also serve as a prison guard to literally monitor those that are in exploitation. There’s only so many people you can keep an eye on 24/7. But so a lot of times for adults, the exploitation becomes sort of totally enwrapped in their circumstance, their life experience and coercion and threats and abuse. But many of those adults have the freedom to leave. They just have nowhere to go. They’re too afraid. They have no community. You know, the people that they’ve trusted and relied on in their life have been a part of exploiting them. Maybe they’ve cried out for help before and it actually got worse. And so we’d hear those stories that many survivors actually had the freedom to leave. They just didn’t believe that there was a possibility that there was a pathway out or that there would be community, that someone would accept them. And so for us, a lot of times what we saw the actual way out for adults was our local partners walking alongside of them in different services, in red light areas, maybe medical clinics, sometimes daycares or night care shelters for their children, where over time they would start to say, you know, you’ve been telling me now for months that there’s hope for me and you’re the first person I believe. And what does that look like? You mean I can leave my my pimp? I can get out of this life? Well, where would I go? Oh, there’s a place for me and there’s community. Can I meet some of those people? And at some point, they actually choose that they’re ready to risk everything, that they’re ready to run or that they’re ready to leave. But they’re the ones taking that risk. Now, it doesn’t downplay the role that people play alongside of them and the community and the support that goes into it. But that moment of risk where they say, you know what, I’m ready to leave, it’s not somebody grabbing them and just saying, hey, we’re here to rescue you. They really have to take that agency and oftentimes that risk. And so we started getting that feedback that rescue felt kind of patronizing. It felt like it’s implying that someone else is the hero coming in to save me when, you know, they would say, I feel like I’m one of the heroes in my own story. And when someone says they rescued me, that doesn’t feel like the whole picture of the risk I had to take, the agency that I took to be a part of my own story. And so that’s really for us when we started thinking, you know, first and foremost, we want to honor those that we serve in everything we do. And if there is a term, even if the number one term, quite literally in the studies that we did, the number one term that supporters of anti-trafficking resonated with was this idea of being a part of rescuing somebody. If that didn’t honor survivors, we wanted to change.

Sandie [00:15:12] I love that you’re following what is recognized movement wide as best practice in getting survivor input. I want to sit for just a moment in what you identified as the number one word that engages your community: rescue. And then I watch you all the time. I watched your videos and things like that and you use the term superheroes. I imagined capes and leagues and Marvel and all of those things. So the risk of bringing that superhero agenda to this movement is significant. Can you describe from a business perspective why it’s critical that we move away from the superhero agenda?

Jeremy [00:16:09] Yeah. Yeah. One of the things that we’re trying to capture and it’s I don’t know that it’s you know, certainly in my lifetime has been harder. You see in every element of culture these battles over language, what terms can we say? What terms can we not say? And any organization, if you walked around and just sort of pulled every other organization to say, well, what words are okay to use and which are not, you’d end up with a dictionary that so crossed out, nobody would know what to say. And every every word you say is never a perfect word. And so that’s part of the tension of saying, okay, how do we capture this in a way, for us, sort of our criteria is saying, how do we capture this in a way that’s true? And when we use terms, how do we define what they mean? Because, again, our community is going to get different definitions depending on who they talk to, what city they live in. They’re going to understand every term. So, for instance, the idea of being a hero, what does that mean in this day and age? And so for us, we try to avoid using just relying on sort of sensationalism to capture emotion, but at the same time inviting people that, you know, for us. So when we use terms like hero, we talk about the idea of like, what does it mean to be heroic? So for us, we believe that when somebody takes time out of their life to advocate for a cause that maybe doesn’t directly connect to them. So it’s one thing if they’re advocating for something because maybe they’re really involved in a community that affects one of their children, whether it’s a medical need that their kid had. And so they lean in because that’s what they’re in proximity with. That’s really important and that’s really powerful. But there’s also something really unique when somebody says, you know what, this is a cause that hasn’t touched my life, but I believe so much in it that I’m going to go out of my way to educate myself, to educate my community, to sacrifice to be a part of it. That that’s part of what it means to be heroic is not to live a life that’s just about yourself. That’s actually, again, coming back to that early principle I talked about as a kid of living a life that says if I have something of a resource, a connection, how do I leverage that to impact those who are marginalized and vulnerable around me? And so trying to use terms in a way that invite people into action and into being heroic, taking an action of sacrifice, but not in this sensationalized sense that this becomes about you. That you know what human trafficking is an opportunity for you to be a hero. Where it starts, it can easily become suddenly less about those that we’re working to serve and more about ourselves. And that’s what we try to avoid, is making ourselves the center of the issue, but instead inviting people to really educate themselves, to lean in, in a way, to be heroic. But because we’re giving agency and opportunity to those that we’re really setting out to serve.

Sandie [00:18:59] I like that agency and opportunity. So you approach things from your business foundations. So tell us about the risks of a name change.

Jeremy [00:19:12] Oh, yeah. So for us, after ten years and this had been on our honestly, we knew it was such a big undertaking that this had actually been on our list to do for for a couple of years. We had planned to do it kind of going into COVID, and then the world turned upside down and we saw so much desperate need around the world. I mean, I think we launched over a dozen COVID response programs in about that many countries in the first three months of COVID. And so we kind of had this moment where we said, you know, we want to change the name. We believe that’s the right way to go. But it’s also a huge risk to the organization. And so COVID hit. So we kind of, we put it on the back burner and focused on launching COVID response programs around the world. But we knew that this was something that was really important. Again, for us, it comes back to how do we do what we do with integrity and with trust. And if we want to earn that trust within the community of our local partners and the survivors that we work with. And if we want to earn that trust with our donors, we have to continue to be transparent. We have to admit mistakes. We have to grow. And you and I both know how much the anti-trafficking movement has changed in the last decade. Human trafficking wasn’t even a term in the lexicon until until two decades ago, basically. And we’ve seen so much growth and maturity. And yet a lot of organizations don’t feel the permission to take that risk, to mature in the ways that the movement is changing. And so I think part of it is trying to build. We’ve tried to build into that culture of saying, look, we have to recognize that this entire movement is young. And because of that, that means we’re going to try things that don’t work, we’re going to take risks, we’re going to have to admit failure, and then we’re going to have to grow. And we know that traffickers– You know, one thing about human trafficking that I think people often forget is we like to pretend or we like to imagine that everybody is united against human trafficking. Well, unfortunately, that’s not the case. It wouldn’t be the fastest growing criminal enterprise if everybody was against it, because this is 100% man made. This is human beings creating exploitation. It’s not like malaria. You know, with malaria, mosquitoes aren’t strategizing like how do we increase the spread rate and how do we get more people sick from malaria? But traffickers are. Traffickers strategize how to leverage COVID to increase exploitation, how to adapt it from in-person to virtual. How do they move and adapt? And if traffickers are taking risks, we as organizations in this fight, we have to adapt. We have to try things. We have to innovate. And if you innovate, it means you will fail. So we’ve tried to weave that into our culture. And so we got to a point where we said, you know, if we’re going to do this with the trust and integrity that it demands of us, we have to be willing to change even if it costs us. You know, with this, our brand is known in over 20 countries around the world where we’re working. And a lot of people love our brand. We have supporters. I mean, we we kind of laughed about this. We felt really bad because we have supporters that have literally our old logo tattooed on their bodies.

Sandie [00:22:15] Oh, my goodness.

Jeremy [00:22:16] And we had a passionate fan base, and it wasn’t our supporters that were asking us to change our name. In fact, they loved it. Many of them said it was, you know, their favorite logo they’d ever seen or their favorite name or that they had really built, you know, they had woven it into their businesses, into their communities, into their churches. But for us to say, okay, for us to continue to lead in the space, we have to show that it’s okay to admit that we need to grow. We need a change. We need to progress.

Sandie [00:22:45] So let’s stop right there and introduce Atlas Free in 3 minutes.

Jeremy [00:22:53] Yeah, absolutely. So the new name as of a month ago is Atlas Free. And so for us our mission statement is to resource and scale the fight against sex trafficking and exploitation. What we love about the idea of an atlas, it has a bit of a nostalgic throwback to many of us grew up with an atlas in the car going on road trips. And an atlas is what kind of shows you how places are connected. It can be an atlas of the world. It can be an atlas of a country, of a state all the way down to cities. You know, we still have an atlas of the United States which you could plan an entire cross-country road trip or a road trip within your state. And moving from the language of rescue, which can imply sort of that we’re the hero. You know, the atlas is never the hero of the road trip. The atlas is just a map that shows people how places are connected, that gets you to the places that are impactful and memorable on your journey. And so for us, really trying to build Atlas. Atlas Free is another way of saying free world. And so this idea of how do we create this map of the world that connects people all over the world together in the cause for freedom? That’s global, that’s local, that’s regional, that shows people how places are connected, that if you wanted a map to fight sex trafficking all around the world, that you come to Atlas Free, that we’re creating that global map, that global connection, the global network that holistically tackles the problem of sex trafficking in the world.

Sandie [00:24:15] So charts and maps sound very strategic. And the key word that I glommed onto when I was going through the new website, which congratulations. It’s beautiful. And I recommend that our listeners go there, understand how what Jeremy is talking about with integrity and trust earning, that is very evident on the web page. But the word I glommed onto was connection. Tell me the role of connection in your vision for Atlas Free.

Jeremy [00:24:53] Yeah. So, you know, I know you and I would share a lot of sort of philosophical alignments. You talk about it at length and in your new book Ending Human Trafficking, and–

Sandie [00:25:02] Oh, that was really clever throwing that out there. Thank you.

Jeremy [00:25:05] Know, it’s great. I think if your listeners haven’t listened, they really should because you talk about, you know, the six Ps. And what we’ve seen around the world is organizations typically focus in one of those areas. Maybe some of them can hit two of those areas. But, you know, you talk about partnership and prevention and protection and prosecution and policy that what we know now in the fight is that it takes a holistic approach to fighting human trafficking. And if you only have one of those things in an area, you’re not going to have a holistic fight to really measurably move the needle on exploitation in that community. And so if that’s the case, if you actually have to have all of those things working in harmony, then the question is, okay, well then is the goal to get every organization to do all of those things? Well, I think most people would say, well, no, if somebody is really great at running a residential facility that works with victims and survivors, they probably don’t have the same toolset to go do legislative work necessarily or investigation work. And so, if the solution is not that every organization needs to do everything, then the only other option is connection, right? Is community and connection. Is that then we have to find the organizations in an area that are doing all of those things. And we have to bring them together in such a way that where one organization stops, the other picks up. And so that’s why we talk about Atlas Free. We often say the phrase that we’re a strategy, not a program. Many organizations start with a program specific, and that’s the right way to do it, where they are launching a program to address one of those pieces. And for us then our job is to find those people that address those different pieces, align them together into a strategy in that region that addresses holistically the whole fight against exploitation.

Sandie [00:26:56] So, now what can people do to get involved that will move forward this new vision for a global network, a global connection?

Jeremy [00:27:12] That’s a great question. Yeah, you mentioned our website. It’s a new website, so we’re constantly adding new stuff right now. You know, we launched it with kind of the base, the kind of core ways that people can get engaged. But we’re always adding new mechanisms. You know, one of the things that’s stuck around, I saw your message recently where you asked if I was climbing any mountains. So I just got off of a couple of mountains. You know, the mountain climbing initiatives, the kind of what we call adventure philanthropy has continued, where we really believe that most people in their lives have activities and things they’re passionate about, that they can connect to the cause. And so we’ve launched an entire initiative around how do we empower people to use their passions and their skills to fight exploitation, whether that’s through their businesses, their summer hikes or climbs or marathons or bike races. How do we invite people to invest in this issue? And one of the things we love about when they do that is because of our model, where we look at trying to holistically align local organizations. Across our network now we have over 40 local partners in over 20 countries running about just over 250 different programs that address all of the Ps. Now, we’re not at the place yet where all of the Ps are being addressed in every region of the world. But that’s the goal is that we can see through local partners and through programing, every P addressed in every region of the world.

Sandie [00:28:33] So one of the headlines on one of your pages on the Atlasfree.org website: investing. So when you’re climbing, you’re actually putting your physical energy into a financial commitment. But it’s not just pouring money and dispersing it. It’s very strategic. Investing in what’s working and building what’s missing. And I think that approach to looking for the gaps is key in the next level. Sustainable work that is locally led, solution focused and agile by nature. Folks, that’s on the website. I’m going to be watching you, Jeremy, to see evidence of that locally led solution focused, sustainable effort, because that is a huge gap in the global movement to end human trafficking.

Jeremy [00:29:35] Yeah. Thank you so much.

Sandie [00:29:37] I’m going to give you about 60 seconds to close. Dave’s given me that we’ve got like this much time left, but not before. I really as I prepared for this, I was reminded how bold and courageous it is to chart a new path when you already have an established path. And there’s lots of biblical precedent. Abram became Abraham, Isaac became Israel. Simon’s name was changed to Peter, and look what happened there. And Saul’s name was changed to Paul and how many books of our New Testament were written by him.

Jeremy [00:30:24] I love that.

Sandie [00:30:25] I can’t wait to see the history of Atlas Free ten years from now, and I’m encouraged. I want to be, maybe I can pass out water at one of the climbs. Although, I have to tell you, I went to Rocky Mountains and climbed 35, well, I climbed is not the right word. I hiked 35 miles of National Park Trail.

Jeremy [00:30:53] Wow.

Sandie [00:30:53] Yeah.

Jeremy [00:30:54] Oh, you’re in.

Sandie [00:30:55] I’m in. I can be. You’ll invite me to the next one?

Jeremy [00:30:58] Absolutely.

Sandie [00:30:59] Okay. So wrapping this up, tell us what we can expect from Atlas Free.

Jeremy [00:31:08] Oh, thank you so much. Thank you for having me. So, yeah, one of the things we really want to build, we know that a lot of people over the last decade or two decades have gotten involved in the anti-trafficking organization. They’ve seen organizations come and go. And a lot of times it can be overwhelming just to say, Well, which one organization do I pick? And so what we’ve tried to build is in many ways, almost like a mutual fund to fight human trafficking. Kind of a one stop shop where people who don’t know where to start can invest with us, knowing that we will deploy those resources around the world, across the global movement, investing in local organizations all around the world who are holistically fighting human trafficking. And so that’s really what we’re setting out to build. That if you want to be a part of that, investing in holistic solutions that are strategic all over the world, we want to build a simple one stop shop for people to say, you know, I want to be a part of this full solution and I don’t know where to start. We want to create the easiest launchpad for people who want to be a part of strategically ending sexual exploitation in the world.

Sandie [00:32:06] Wow. I’m excited to watch and learn and I’m going to be tracking your Atlas online. Thank you so much for joining us today, Jeremy.

Jeremy [00:32:19] Thank you.

Dave [00:32:21] Thank you both for this conversation. We’re inviting you now to take the first step, go online and download a copy of Sandie’s guide, The Five Things You Must Know: A Quick Start Guide to Ending Human Trafficking. It’s absolutely free. It’ll teach you the five critical things Sandie’s identified that you should know before you join the fight against human trafficking. You can get access by going over to endinghumantrafficking.org. And we’re also building and expanding our community of advocates. And by becoming one of our patrons, you can get access to exclusive content. And we’re building a community of advocates around the world who are fighting human trafficking in their communities. How does it work? Just go over to endinghumantrafficking.org. You can click on Patreon and get access to new content such as bonus questions and segments and extra resources. It’s simple and affordable. $5 a month to get access to the Ending Human Trafficking Patreon benefits. Certainly give more if you’d like. Go over to endinghumantrafficking.org and if you’re already a patron, thank you so much for your support. We’re so honored to be able to continue to support the learning and development for all of us so that we can continue to be advocates for ending human trafficking. And of course, we will be back in two weeks for our very next conversation. Thank you, Sandie. Thank you, Jeremy. Have a great day, everybody. Take care.