Shifting from a "rescue and restore" model to a wellbeing model can feel like a daunting task, especially when it's a major change for an organization and its programs, funders, and community. While this level of a shift in thinking requires a deeper level of engagement with impacted communities than this one website can offer, there are some basic steps that can start you in the right direction.
Long before there was a Trafficking Victims Protection Act, there were sex workers organizing for safety, freeing each other from the control of exploiters, responding to workers experiencing domestic violence, and advocating for the safety, education, and empowerment of runaway and homeless youth without supportive families. Due to the politicization of sex work, these organizers' voices were largely excluded (and often intentionally maligned) throughout the creation of anti-trafficking law.
Aileen’s is a peer-centered organizing and hospitality space located in Federal Way for women working along the Pac Hwy. This is the area south of Seattle stretching from around SEATAC airport to the south end of King County that is home to many women who trade sex and where Gary Ridgeway, a.k.a. Green River Killer, sought his victims.
BIPOC Adult Industry Collective offers microgrant support, educational webinars, and mental health and support programming. They offer financial support for therapy as well as for BIPOC sex workers leaving domestic violence.
Women with a Vision aims to improve the lives of marginalized women, their families, and communities by addressing the social conditions that hinder their health and well-being through advocacy, health education, supportive services, and community-based participatory research.
In collaboration with Alliance for Hope International, FFI designed this resource primarily for programs that focus their work with people who have experienced domestic and sexual violence. It provides actionable information, exercises, and tools to help shift from a singular focus on short-term safety toward increasing survivor safety in the context of creating opportunities to support long-term wellbeing.
The PEARR tool, created by CommonSpirit Health, HEAL Trafficking, and Pacific Survivor Center is an evidence-based framework for assessment for trafficking and other forms of interpersonal violence. It is based off the CUES model, or universal education approach, which is trauma-informed, patient-centered, and recognizes that creating an emotionally and physically safe context for disclosure is often more effective than a checklist screening tool.
The Wellbeing Blueprint took shape in 2020 when a group of changemakers came together to turn a crisis into a turning point.
For generations, marginalized communities responding to injustice had been sidelined, under-resourced or ignored. Then COVID-19 and the murder of George Floyd shook the nation to its core. A long-overdue reckoning began taking place as more people became aware of the inequities and atrocities that communities had been organizing around for decades.
The oft-repeated statement “sex work is work” does not imply that everything is fine with sex work as is. It means that sex work is a site of survival, of struggles and accomplishments, of exploitation and resistance, of degredation and dignity, like any other work. Decriminalizing sex work does not begin and end with decriminalizing sex work: rather, it is a framework that proposes a radical transformation of social, economic, and political structures to enable full lives and opportunities for all.
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The Wellbeing Model is an independent network of human trafficking survivors, grassroots organizers, and affiliated organizations working collectively to end human trafficking through fostering individual and community wellness. While we draw inspiration from the Full Frame Initiative’s Wellbeing Framework and recommend their resources, we are not affiliated with FFI and do not represent them in any way.
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