The Avery Center — formerly known as Free Our Girls — was founded almost a decade ago to address the direct service gap for survivors in Northern Colorado and across the United States. The nonprofit offers trauma-informed services with an emphasis on economic empowerment through entrepreneurship. Offering programs like job training and financial literacy, The Avery Center seeks to break the cycle of poverty, reducing risk factors for re-trafficking and re-exploitation. The org also has a research arm that focuses on advocating and evaluating demand and harm reduction frameworks, striving to better “identify, intervene, and empower” anyone who has experienced exploitation.

Free the Girls is powered by bras – quite literally. The organization collects lightly-worn bra donations around the world in order to help survivors of human trafficking start their own businesses selling bras in local markets. To date, FTG has shipped 1.75 million bras worldwide for sex trafficking survivors, with a goal of helping women exiting sex trafficking reintegrate into their communities through micro-entrepreneurship and, ultimately, economic empowerment.

According to this Texas-based nonprofit, 55% of domestic minor victims of sex trafficking between the ages of 7 and 11 years are recruited through social media. UAHT aims to change that by offering a wide variety of programming geared towards young people, including Social Media Safety Workshops that teach youth how to stay safe as our digital worlds become increasingly complex. Curriculum includes topics like how traffickers use social media and how to spot suspicious profiles on social media. They also offer a trauma-informed support group called Real Talk for teens who have already experienced trauma or trafficking and may be vulnerable to revictimization.