Our Work Related to Immigration

According to the US Department of Justice (DOJ) an estimated 50,000 women and children are trafficked into the United States each year. Victims are often lured into trafficking networks through false promises of good working conditions and high pay as domestic workers, factory and farm workers, nannies, waitresses, sales clerks, or models. Once in this country, many suffer extreme physical and mental abuse, including rape, sexual exploitation, torture, beatings, starvation, death threats, and threats to family members. It is believed that most victims who are trafficked are isolated and remain undetected by the public because 1) the strategies used by the perpetrators isolate victims and prevent them from coming forward, and 2) the public and the victim service providers have only recently become aware of this issue and may not be familiar with how to recognize or respond to trafficking victims.

To help stem human trafficking in the US, the Self Reliance Foundation is working with its media partner Hispanic Communications Network to design a Spanish-language public awareness campaign with support from the US Department of Justice – Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA).

This high-impact multimedia campaign is launching in early November 2009. The campaign will pilot in the Washington, DC metro area. Produced in Spanish, this effort will support local human trafficking programs and services, and also help to increase detection and reporting of cases of human trafficking among the local Spanish-speaking population.

To complement the media campaign, SRF will collaborate with the Hispanic-serving community and faith-based partners to disseminate the campaign’s public education materials, and implement interpersonal grassroots outreach efforts to engage “Good Samaritan” members of the greater Hispanic community in the campaign. Our strategy two-pronged strategy is designed to increase the number of community members who understand how to identify human trafficking victims, are aware of the purpose and services of the local service providers, and ultimately are willing to work with the these groups to identify and also rescue and assist human trafficking victims.

To learn more about human trafficking please visit the US Department of Justice’s Online Description.

To help inform and further empower the Latino population in the United States, SRF’s Acceso Hispano initiative recently launched an interactive, multi-dimensional online presence with several innovative features.

The main platform, housed at the website www.accesohispano.org includes four different interfaces directed at four different target audiences:

• English (designed to inform stakeholders about issues facing the Latino community)
• Spanish (designed to reach Spanish-language dominant Hispanics with relevant articles about issues that affect them, in addition to links to helpful websites or organizations)
• Service Providers (developed to help community-based service providers across the country better serve the Latino community by providing tailored information and resources)
• Promotores (to help Acceso Hispano’s network of community-based promoters better serve the community)

The different sections of the Acceso Hispano website include features to help facilitate communication with the public including newsletters; discussion forums; calls for articles from the public; SMS texting capacity; events calendars; comments; email forms; visual search features and more.

The website is designed to complement Acceso Hispano’s toll-free bilingual telephone hotline which provides free information and referrals to callers around the country related to job training, ESL classes, scholarship opportunities, health care options, voter registration sites, domestic violence shelters, and a vast array of other services requested by the Spanish-speaking Hispanic community.  To ensure that the community has access to the culturally-sensitive community based services that they need at any time of day, Acceso Hispano is developing a searchable web-based database of providers.  Service providers can easily update their information online, search the database to help make referrals for their clients, and the general public can conduct instantaneous searches for the specialized services available in their own communities.

Click here to download a brochure about Acceso Hispano.