While shame and pain kept her quiet for years, Kelly Patterson’s journey of healing and freedom from sex trafficking are giving her a loud voice today. Kelly is the founder and Executive Director of Treasured Lives, a survivor-led anti-sex trafficking nonprofit organization with a clear but simple mission of helping and inspiring survivors by providing advocacy, crisis care, support groups, and peer mentoring. Her artwork and writing skills reflect her passion to reach out to other survivors, lend understanding to their family and friends, and light a fire in others to help in the fight against sex trafficking in all its forms.
Biography
While shame and pain kept her quiet for years, Kelly’s journey of healing and freedom from sex trafficking are giving her a loud voice today. Having survived the unsurvivable, her skills come forth in maneuvering the difficult arena of a very painful subject matter. Her courage to walk into a crowd and discuss this controversial subject is a communication gift that she excels in. Her tenacity to see others freed keeps her pushing through the most difficult of obstacles. Kelly has traveled to hostile and distant areas to carry her message of freedom.
She desires to be an aid in freeing those wounded from the effects of commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking. Coming from the perspective of one who has walked the long road out, Kelly has a dynamic style and ability to relate to her audience. As a speaker, she is engaging and unafraid to tell it like it is. Withholding the hard truths is not a road she has chosen to take. Her artwork and writing skills reflect her passion to reach out to other survivors, lend understanding to their family and friends, and light a fire in others to help in the fight against sex trafficking in all its forms.
Kelly was trafficked in and from the Heartland of the USA and taken to distant places. Her experiential knowledge of how trafficking operates in the Midwest is incredibly valuable to those hoping to make a difference in this very real war. She details her captivity in the dark world of sex trafficking/commercial sexual exploitation and the journey out in her book “From Trafficked to Treasured”.
Kelly has also co-authored a book titled “Freedom Cry” which is due to be released in February of 2022. She is also in the process of finalizing the facilitator manual and accompanying workbook titled “The Pendulum”.
Kelly is the founder and Executive Director of Treasured Lives, a survivor-led anti-sex trafficking 501c3 non-profit organization with a clear but simple mission of helping and inspiring survivors by providing advocacy, crisis care, support groups, and peer mentoring. She is also a Lead Pastor, Advocate, Consultant, Mentor, Speaker, Author, Artist, Wife, Mother, and Grandmother.
Memberships: Kelly Patterson is a member of The West River Human Trafficking Task Force; South Dakota (SD) Network Against Family Violence and Sexual Assault; SD Survivor Task Force; National Institute of Justice – for American Indian and Alaska Native women; FAST Sexual Assault Initiative; USD OVW Advisory Board for Indigenous-led Research on Sex Trafficking among Native Americans in South Dakota; World Without Exploitation; along with multiple local collaborations.