Embers International

Our Work

At its core, our work is advocacy.

PROTECT

SAHASEE EMBERS

Sahasee (“courageous” in Hindi) Embers is a haven serving women and children living in red-light districts in India. Once a brothel, it now serves the community as a daycare center, emergency shelter, community center, legal aid clinic, and education center. For children born into brothels, Sahasee Embers is a safe place to rest, play, learn, and sleep, and for women trapped in sex trade, the center provides a caring community. Our Sahasee Embers children have a chance to experience a future filled with freedom and hope, and through our various programs, families have a chance to break free from generational violence and bondage. As the name Sahasee Embers implies, we see those whom our center serves as courageous little flames.

CRISIS RELIEF INITIATIVE

Leveraging our long-standing relationships with trusted partners in the field, our Crisis Relief Initiative responds in real-time when disaster strikes. Responding swiftly to India’s nationwide lockdown, we launched a relief program that mobilized volunteers to assemble and distribute care packages to the most vulnerable communities to complement the work of local emergency response actors.

RESTORE

TRAUMA-INFORMED COUNSELING

Truama- informed councling is a special form of treatment for those who have expirenced sexual abuse, trafficking, or other forms of violence. We partner with a local team of trained counselors who assess the trauma experienced by each survivor and formulate appropriate long-term treatment plans that promote physical, psychological and emotional restoration and empowerment.

R3G2 PROJECT

Trafficked victims, inevitably and tragically, give a legacy of exploitation to their children who are born into brothels. To stop this intergenerational exploitation and help them be reintegrated into the society, it requires a tailored, individualized case management approach (rather than a prescriptive program) that supports both generations for sustained freedom. R3G2 Project provides a holistic approach that addresses each survivor’s physical, psychological, familial, educational, and socio-economic needs as well as a case management team that consistently journeys with them in each step of their restoration, renewal, and reintegration towards intergenerational freedom and economic independence.

EMPOWER

LEGACY EDUCATION

Legacy Education is a blooming program that provides at-risk youths and the survivors of trafficking with access to higher education. Our model creates opportunities for them to become professionals, such as nurses, engineers, lawyers, and designers and to break the cycle of intergenerational poverty for themselves and their family. All of our Legacy Education students are the first generation to go to college in their family. Upon securing gainful employment, our Legacy Education graduates are invited to invest in the education of the next round of students, creating an enduring and generative legacy. Watch to learn more below.

G.R.A.C.E. INITIATIVE

The Generational Restoration and Children’s Education Initiative (“G.R.A.C.E. Initiative”) provides our Sahasee Embers children, born into brothels and/or living in a red-light district, with an opportunity to re-write their own destiny through access to proper education in private pre-primary, primary, and secondary schools. To support their school education, the G.R.A.C.E. Initiative also provides our children with after-school programs, counseling, nutrition, health checkups, and extracurricular activities. We are hopeful that through this generation-transforming opportunity, our children will be empowered to overcome the adversity into which they were born and become catalysts for change.

Why South Asia?

Watch the below BBC news clip released in 2020 to learn more about the devastatingly lucrative trafficking industry targeting children in South Asia.

Click for BBC News Clip

Click for South Asia GLobal Slavery Index

Moved by our experience with the people of Mumbai, India, we are compelled to stand in the gap for those experiencing tremendous personal suffering. The exploitation of women and children living in red-light districts in Mumbai is tragic, a generational crisis compounded by myriad factors, including violent crime against the poor, socially embedded prejudice, and utter disregard for humanity. Although it is not a unique problem to Mumbai or India, we have found a great need for intervention on behalf of the lives of the vulnerable women and children in India. Social, cultural, economic, and historic oppression and inequality against the poor, the weak, and the marginalized contribute to the vicious cycle of intergenerational exploitation—but we can break this cycle together. It can end with a bold, sustainable, and transformative model of intervention. We look to a future with great hope and expectation, a future where bonds are broken and the smallest, most suppressed embers are set free to flourish.