Prevent Child Trafficking Through Education

The Freedom Story provides mentorship through one-on-one home visits with our scholarship students and workshops open to all students in the region. Our Girls club is an on-going workshop that continues to be a highlight for many of our students.

Jenna, one of our Resource Center volunteers, and Ketsara, our Leadership Development Director, co-lead clubs on Thursday and Saturdays. Girls club workshops are a great opportunity for girls to strengthen friendships, meet new peers, and learn about themselves and their communities. Through empowering individual girls and strengthening communal bonds, the workshops ultimately prevent trafficking. This month the girls finished a section on “Building Character.” Covering topics like “self-image,” “what makes you happy?” and “making healthy choices,” the girls explored new ideas and questions in a safe and open environment. Many of them said they hadn’t learned about some of the topics before and that the Girls Club is a great addition to the programs offered by The Freedom Story.

Pim*, one of our scholarship students who is in 9^th grade, told our staff, “Girls Club is so much fun. It helps teach us a lot of things about our friends and about ourselves.”

We’re incredibly thankful to partner with you in bringing valuable opportunities, such as Girls Club, to our students.

With hope,

The Freedom Story Team

*Name has been changed to protect the anonymity of the student 

Dear Friends,

The last few weeks have been very exciting for our staff and students in Thailand as our students participated in some fun activities to wrap up summer break. Our primary and high school students started the new school year this month. Our University students will start the fall semester at the beginning of August.

We love to encourage our students and help them overcome adversity and struggles in school and life. Because of your support, we can provide mentors for all of our scholarship students. The mentors focus on building and maintaining positive relationships with our students to help them when the students face difficulties in life. Our mentors also encourage students to participate in activities we host at our resource centers to build resiliency. Recently, our students got to learn firsthand about adversity when an NBA basketball player visited them at our resource centers.

We are so fortunate that Jeremy Lin, a professional basketball player for the Brooklyn Nets, visited our resource centers to see our work firsthand and learn more about the issue of child exploitation. Our students had a blast playing basketball with him and listening to him talk about his story and the struggles he faced. He encouraged the students to work hard and follow their dreams no matter what anyone else says. Lisa Winterfeldt, our International Liaison, stated “It was inspiring for the kids and staff to have NBA basketball player, Jeremy Lin, visit. He has such an inspirational story about having to work hard to overcome stereotypes with adversity to get to where he is today in professional basketball. It was so wonderful seeing the kids be inspired by his story to stay in school, work very hard, and never give up on their dreams.”

Thank you so much for your continued support in helping us disrupt child exploitation through prevention.

With hope,

The Freedom Story Team