Amanda Finger & AnnJanette Alejano-Steele
Co-Founders of LCHT
Laboratory to Combat Human Trafficking

On this 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day, we would like to add our voices to the millions celebrating this day globally. As women who are co-founders of our organization, we wanted to reflect upon the profound accomplishments on the behalf of women by women.

Today, we honor the history of gender equality as a fundamental human right.

Today we honor the struggle for equality, justice, peace and development on the behalf of women worldwide. Our own organizational values echo those of the central organizing principle of the work of the United Nations: that “no enduring solution to society's most threatening social, economic and political problems can be found without the full participation, and the full empowerment, of the world's women.”

Drawing from the United Nations website, International Women's Day celebrates women as makers of history. The day is rooted in the centuries-old struggle of women participating in society on an equal footing with men. As we reflect upon the long history of women working against human trafficking, we recognize and honor the histories of women worldwide who have been working in their local communities for social change. We recognize that there have been unsung heroes, women who have paved the way for anti-trafficking efforts, long before formal policies and laws. We are grateful for the paths that they pioneered ahead of us, many of whom have not had the privilege of access to formal educations and communications technologies - the portals by which social change discourses are often framed. We humbly hope that we’re carrying on their work to inform our approaches to understanding human trafficking in our local communities.

In our six years of anti-trafficking work in Colorado, we’ve observed that the majority of sex trafficking cases have involved young women, while the majority of labor trafficking cases have involved men. Overwhelmingly, our partners in the anti-trafficking movement are extraordinary women who are investigating, prosecuting, and supporting victims and survivors of trafficking, some of whom have survived trafficking themselves. And while they may not be authoring bestselling books, the impact they are making is to be commended. We absolutely could not create such impacts without male allies and GLBT communities, but today we honor the commitment of women and girls who are taking small steps to make our communities better places.

Because education is one of our organization’s core values, we invite you to learn more about International Women’s Day. Engage and learn about its commemoration in the United States between the 1910’s and 20’s…and question what happened in the decades that followed. Find out when the United Nations began sponsoring International Women’s Day. Find out which countries hold International Women’s Day as an official holiday. And then critically question which ones don’t.

Think about ways in which we’ve benefited from the work of those who trailblazed ahead of us, and paved the way to access and availability of information.

In this blog, we would like to preview two projects that reflect our guiding principles, the Colorado Project and Fall 2011 Demand Reduction Roundtable. Both projects honor the input of people “on the ground”, grounded in the context of community. Over the next year, we will regularly produce blogs about these projects to 1) keep folks informed of our progress, and 2) engage in critical discussions around human trafficking.

The Colorado Project to Comprehensively Combat Human Trafficking (Colorado Project) is a collaborative initiative that aims to help states better understand how well they are combating human trafficking. It’s a project that will honor local communities, document promising practices, and inform anti-human trafficking efforts.

In an effort to engage in conversations around the “demand” side of human trafficking, LCHT will host a 2-day roundtable discussion in Fall 2011. We seek to draw in a diversity of perspectives, to provide a space for ongoing interchanges, and to clearly frame the relationship between demand reduction initiatives and anti-trafficking efforts. With Governor Hickenlooper’s commitment to address demand within his first 100 days in office, combined with an increased focus on demand at the national level, LCHT believes it prudent to engage in these discussions as part of our training and education programs.

Thank you for supporting LCHT’s work and doing your part to work toward a solution to ending human trafficking.

Amanda and A.J.