Like many across the country, we at Polaris felt strong, diverse reactions to last week’s election results. However, regardless of our political affiliation, you and I know that exploiting human beings for profit must be stopped in our country. This is an issue that we can all unite around: victims of human trafficking still need our support while we pursue the traffickers who rob individuals of their freedom.
As we transition to a new Executive Branch Administration, Polaris’s organizational values will not change. We always serve a mission that is bigger than ourselves and we recognize we cannot do this work alone. Every day we strive to model the following values in our work: a spirit of service, honoring the survivor experience, inclusion and equity, humility, courage, and taking actions that achieve results. By working collectively, we can end human trafficking and restore freedom to survivors.
Polaris’s bipartisan efforts to prevent this form of modern slavery and protect vulnerable people are as important as ever. With some 60,000 supporters, activists, partners, and donors, we will continue to:
-
Provide survivors of human trafficking with vital support and a variety of options to get help and stay safe through the National Human Trafficking Hotline and Polaris’s BeFree Textline.
-
Spotlight where and how traffickers operate and analyze data to identify individual forms of trafficking so we can more effectively disrupt trafficking networks and stop them from harming more people.
-
Bring together police departments, local service providers, and policy makers to shut down illicit massage businesses and other trafficking networks, as well as strengthen services for survivors.
-
Build international regional partnerships between governments and civil society to combat both sex and labor trafficking and strengthen the safety net for survivors in both the U.S. and Mexico.
-
Reach out to elected officials at the federal and state level to pass stronger laws that move the anti-trafficking field forward.
Achieving each of these goals requires that we build partnerships across movements to promote gender equality, along with the rights of racial and ethnic minorities, and LGBTQ populations. Only then can we disrupt the conditions that allow human trafficking to thrive in our society.
We thank you for supporting us in these efforts. And we look forward to uniting with you to pursue our vision of a world where Freedom Happens Now.
Photo credit: John Menard / Flickr
