FORBES: Startup’s Mission: Teaching Victims Of Human Trafficking New Job Skills

FORBES: Startup’s Mission: Teaching Victims Of Human Trafficking New Job Skills

By Anne Field , CONTRIBUTOR, FORBES

A mind-boggling  number of people globally are victims of human trafficking—about 25 million, including those exploited for cheap labor, sex or in state-imposed forced labor, according to the International Labor Organization and Walk Free Foundation.

While groups around the world try to rescue victims and get them to a safe place, that’s only one part of the process, according to experts in this area. They also need to learn skills and develop the ability to make a living on their own.

Dawn Manske not only understood all that, but decided to do something about it. In 2011, she launched St. Louis-based Made for Freedom, which sells jewelry, bags, t-shirts and other things made by rescued victims living in safe houses that may shelter victims, as well as provide counseling, education and other help. “If a young woman doesn’t have the skills to support herself, she’s likely to go back to the life she was leading before,” says Manske. It’s all about providing what Manske calls “dignified employment.” The company works with centers—Manske’s term for safe houses—primarily in India, China and Thailand.

She also just raised a $25,000 loan through a Kiva fundraising campaign, her third through that site.

It all started in the 1990’s, when Manske was working in China as an English teacher and then an administrator for  an international church. There she heard from a friend who headed a school for children who had been trafficked, about what that exploitation was like–and it stuck in her mind. In  2006, she came back to the States, and two years later, saw a video by an undercover reporter of Cambodian children forced into prostitution. “From that moment, it weighed on me all the time,” she says.

The final ingredients: In  2011, she got married and her husband-to-be gave her a pair of sandals made by girls in Uganda and sold by a social enterprise, a business form she hadn’t heard a lot about before. At the same time, a friend sent her several pairs of a unique type of fisherman’s pants from Thailand. In short order, a seeming avalanche of strangers, from a TSA agent at an airport to shoppers in parking lots, complimented her on the unusual clothing.

 
That’s when the concept occurred to her: Start a social enterprise to sell those pants, redesigned to be less baggy, made by victims in safe houses. With that in mind, Manske reached out to friends overseas, looking for recommendations for centers where women learned how to sew, and located a place in Thailand for young women belonging to the Hmong minority. She officially launched the company in 2011, but didn’t really get going for a while; three years later, she received her first order of pants.