Week 7:
Institute for Exploited, Trafficked and Missing Persons

August 9, 2013

The event seems to be coming at me at 8 billion miles an hour.  There are so many last minute things to do.  I am like a tornado at work office to office in seconds.  Just call me the Flash.  Seriously though everyone is being so supportive and ticket sales are way up which is amazing and relieving.  Between arranging contracts, branding, marketing emails, sponsorship lunches, and good old fashioned word of mouth I have exhausted every channel that I can think of to get the word out about this event.  I am scheming all sorts of ways to get the guests to donate at the event as well, my hope is that this event will result in much more awareness for our issues and a few more donors.

Coordinating volunteers has proven especially challenging, everyone has an agenda and a preference, all of which make placement and job assignment very difficult.  Add to that the fact that I am young and only an intern and we get a lot of people who don’t want to listen to me.  I have had to play the diplomat many times while I have a million other things to fix.  It makes me sympathize with those people who end up snapping at their volunteers and employees.  People are certainly the hardest thing to manage effectively. There is this incredibly fine line to walk between giving those who you are managing enough leash so that you get the best return on their unique talents and making sure that you don’t have people destroying boundaries and causing miscommunications.

This last weekend was the “Empowered” concert which was put on by the International Abolitionist network to raise awareness in the twin cities for the issue of human trafficking. We were asked to come and present because they were impressed with our earlier presentation at their meeting.   There were about 300 people at the concert and it was a beautiful day for an outdoor event.  Patrick spoke and the organizers of the event were impressed by his energy and passion for the issue.  It is so great to get our name out there seeing as we are still relatively new and unknown in the twin cities. We were also able to sell a bunch of our free trade items that are made in Guatemala and then donated to our program there.

Speaking of fair trade we had an amazing meeting with a sponsor for our event.  I walked into this beautiful art gallery and free trade shop called Regla De Oro which translates to “the golden rule” and asked if they would be willing to sponsor or donate something for the raffle.  They were great, certainly lived up to their name.  They donated some expensive and beautiful items for the raffle and then we had a discussion on ways they would be willing to further support us.  They offered to have a gallery opening for us and said that we could use their space for future receptions for free! They were an amazing contact to make. I found her attitude to be both refreshing and inspiring.  It is possible to be a responsible and civically involved business owner and still do well.

We are also working on researching and prepping for a really cool speaking opportunity that Patrick is going to in the early fall. There is a conference being held in North Dakota called the Bakken Oil Expo.  This is a huge Expo being put on by one of the companies that is drilling in the northern part of the state and it is going to be required for many of the management and workers to attend.  There will be all kinds of speakers and events and we will be one of them.  They want Patrick to come and speak on the problem of human trafficking and sexual violence in the area and how to design training programs for oil field workers that will actually work.  We have been researching the issue all week and it is certainly shocking how few resources woman and children who are being exploited have in the region surrounding the oil fields.  Furthermore the more we look into the issue the more we see that this problem is especially severe in this region.  The amounts of rapes and sexual assaults as well as forced prostitution in the Williston region have skyrocketed since the oil boom and that puts their average numbers way above the averages for the rest of the country.  It is a good thing that we are going to speak but there is so much more that needs to be done to right this injustice.  That seems like a constant refrain here, that there is just so much to be done and so little time to do it.