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 South Asia. 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
Trauma-informed counseling is a special form of treatment for those who have experienced 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.
ROOTS & WINGS (R3G2)
A legacy of multi-generational freedom must start from whole family restoration. That’s why Embers has designed its
Roots & Wings initiative (formerly R3G2 Project) to reintegrate both the survivor mother and her children—together—into safe and healthy communities with the educational opportunities and economic independence to truly flourish. This tailored approach of individualized, trauma-informed case management for each family may be a long journey, but it is a holistic, replicable model of hope.
Rooted in a secure base, our “Roots & Wings families” are empowered to spread their own wings and fly towards a hopeful future.
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.
