We actually started these programs because we had no responses in our chair's community to address this in 2018. We had already worked in the trauma area, seeing over 5,000 children and youth through our programs. The hole in the bucket was getting bigger when it came to human trafficking.
We went on a journey and visited Wounded Warriors on the west coast and got their protocols. We did our research with Dr. Jacqui Linder and.... I have too many cohorts and colleagues to list. They are the whole reason that we are successful with helping a survivor self-direct to find their own agency in order to make decisions about what they want to do—to either exit or keep themselves safe.
We don't empower anybody. We assess people through the horses because they're the number one trauma resolver. It's funny to see a girl who's been in intercity trafficking walk down the driveway to our barn. She has her nails and hair and she says, “Oh, they stink.” Then we watch the horses respond and tell the girl that she's safe enough in the community. They hold space and help her ground, even if it's for two minutes. We know from the psychology behind this that it allows her neural pathways to start to reconnect through the frontal lobe and the cerebral cortex so that she will have the capacity to mitigate her own risk in the future.