We are excited to announce our 3rd 2023 Fall Grant Recipient!

Thanks to our generous Legacy Giving Circle donor community, Red Oak Hope is receiving a $25,000 grant towards providing community-based services for exploited and trafficked women.

Initiative Location: Austin, Texas

Initiative Cause Areas: Human Trafficking and Sexual Exploitation

UN Sustainable Development Goals: 03 Good Health & Well-Being

Initiative Description: We plan to expand our services to meet the needs of sexually exploited and trafficked women by providing community-based trauma-informed and victim-centered advocacy and case management, temporary shelter, mental health support, disability support, medical care, transportation, and basic necessities. We will utilize highly trained staff to meet survivors who are looking to stabilize and move towards recovery right where they are, assess critical needs, creatively make a plan alongside the individual for short-term safety and stabilization, and connect them to community resources to help with their immediate and short term goals in the stabilization process.

Our community is currently experiencing a significant lack of comprehensive services for adult survivors of sex trafficking. This need is exacerbated by minimal access to emergency shelters and zero dedicated emergency beds for adult survivors of human trafficking. As such, we are constantly engaging with survivors who do not have access to immediate shelter, mental health resources, medical care, basic needs, and relational support to navigate complex systems and access services. This funding will allow us to expand our non-residential services to address the problem of a lack of accessible, holistic, consistent services for sexually exploited and trafficked women, which leave them unable to achieve stability and successfully transition into their next level of restoration and healing.

These non-residential services will allow us to build a collaborative and highly individualized crisis intervention and stabilization plan that includes safe, consistent, and well-trained advocates to act as both a primary support and a throughline with the additional community providers clients generally engage with to stabilize. Staff will communicate with the client and other providers and assist in goal setting and follow-up. We will be able to provide temporary shelter to establish a baseline of safety to support all the other needs the client might have; mental health support includes emergency triage, psychiatric evaluation, medication management, prescription payment, and transportation; access to addiction recovery support services and harm reduction solutions for clients not ready to engage in recovery; disability support includes evaluation for appropriate diagnoses, connecting to applicable benefits, and education around strengths and areas where support is needed; medical care; and meeting basic needs.

Initiative Impact: This funding will allow us to expand our services by supporting clients through providing trauma-informed and victim-centered advocacy and case management, temporary shelter, mental health support, disability support, medical care, transportation, and meeting basic needs.
We will also be able to provide a limited number of neuropsychological evaluations for any of the 6 clients who have not received adequate assessments for mental illness and/or disabilities.

This solution will effectively reduce barriers to entry to admission into residential programs (or finding other long-term solutions) mentioned in the problem section above by allowing clients to achieve stability. We expect to see improvements in behavioral health, physical health, safety, and housing which will be measured and tracked over time through our use of the Outcomes for Human Trafficking Survivors tool developed by RTI.