A woman who can be described as a wife, mom, grandma, community volunteer, and leader among the nonprofit community always preferred to live on the sunny side of the street and believed the best about people. After attending training about human trafficking (HT), she said,
“I began noticing signs of it in my community.”

Traffickers use social media to recruit, groom, and exploit children

and adults for their own benefit.

She resigned her full-time position at a local NGO and spent the next two years learning as much as she could about human trafficking. Little did she know that not long after her awareness began, that she and her husband would report a missing teen to the local police and to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC). https://southerngritadvocacy.org/resources/

Time to Take Action

November 4, 2019 https://southerngritadvocacy.org/our-team-2/ The original mission was to prevent, disrupt, and end sex trafficking through education and advocacy. As the organization began training others, they realized that educating about human trafficking included more than just sex trafficking, so the mission was updated.
COVID-19 greatly affected fundraising efforts for the new start-up in 2020. Participating in Texoma Gives, the annual online giving day in North Texas, resulted in receiving desperately needed funds to operate.  https://www.texomagives.org/organizations/southern-grit-advocacy As a new startup, Southern Grit Advocacy joined many other NGOs and government offices in championing HT prevention education in Texas Public Schools. An Education Committee was formed. The Committee reviewed nine prevention curricula, listed results in an easy-to-read chart, and shared it with educators and community members. The Personal Safety Savvy program is our overall personal safety and prevention education for K-12 grade students that began in 2021 by partnering with youth-serving organizations. We have used both free and licensed prevention curricula from various resources and publishers. We are especially grateful that Southern Grit Advocacy became a community education partner with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) in 2021. https://www.missingkids.org/ They provided, and continue to provide, guidance, training, and free age-appropriate resources for prevention education. Their free resources are also used to educate adults about the unfortunate realities of human trafficking and child sexual exploitation. We are extremely appreciative for the Office of the Texas Governor’s Child Sex Trafficking Team who mentored our Board members as we tried to find our footing and fill gaps in the anti-trafficking arena.