Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: Welcome to the Love Justice Podcast where we hear from different voices who are joining us in the fight against modern day slavery.
[00:00:09] Speaker B: Here's your host, Hannah Munn.
[00:00:13] Speaker C: Welcome to the Love Justice Podcast where we share the ideas behind Love Justice's impactful work through conversations about fighting the world's greatest injustices.
Today we are talking with Mike Mercer, President and CEO of Compassion first, one of our partners in the fight against human trafficking. It's in addition to their work in Aftercare, prevention and government partnership in Indonesia, Compassion first joins with Love justice to carry out transit monitoring there, identifying and intercepting potential victims before they're trafficked.
Mike has spent several years on nearly every front of this battle and he believes in prevention, though often overlooked, is the key to changing its trajectory. Joining him is our own John Molino, and together we'll dig into why prevention rarely gets the spotlight. We what's at stake when it doesn't happen, and how strategies like transit monitoring could scale to stop trafficking before it starts. Let's dig in. Welcome to the Love Justice Podcast, Mike.
We're glad to have you here.
[00:01:15] Speaker B: I'm glad to be here, thanks. Good to see you both.
[00:01:18] Speaker C: If you don't mind, Mike, I think what would be an appropriate way to start is just if you could briefly share about Compassion first work in Indonesia and how your path crossed with Love Justice.
[00:01:33] Speaker B: Yeah, we do really comprehensive aftercare work in Indonesia, have been there since about 2010.
Our primary or flagship work is in residential aftercare, which is it's world class on that front. And then there are a number of things adjacent to that, including legal advocacy work on behalf of survivors, law enforcement and other governmental partnership. And then our prevention work that is outside of our partnership with Love justice is community development work in severely blighted populations, specifically in and around cemetery communities where the cemeteries become penny brothels at night. And the slums that surround those central city cemeteries are very much informed by the economy of the prostitution in those penny brothels. And so as far as our friendship with Love Justice, I'm pretty sure we initially crossed paths with our mutual participation in the Accord Network or just prior to that, actually, I think Kirk reached out to me and a fellow Portlander, by marriage, I think. And so, and then I remember talking to him about the Accord Network and then Love justice became members. And while that association is upwards of 150 organizations, there just aren't very many of us doing frontline anti trafficking work.
[00:03:14] Speaker C: And Mike, when people hear anti trafficking, they usually think of rescue or Aftercare, which is definitely your flagship program and areas that your organization is actively involved in, has been involved in over several years.
Over the years. And in your experience, what kinds of interventions have you seen emphasized most? And why do you think prevention is so often overlooked?
[00:03:43] Speaker B: I think even aftercare gets overlooked. I think the narrative of rescue is the narrative that's out there.
And I don't necessarily think it's the consumer's fault that that is the narrative that gets pushed. It's the narrative that gets response and reaction.
And so I think it's what gets emphasized most, even that which is not necessarily for real or not as abundantly for real as you might think.
You know, I. I think there's two experiences that I have. You know, I'm speaking in churches on most Sundays, and it's a sincere privilege to do that, to minister in the church this way, to explain that this is our gospel work.
And I will be almost in every church approached by two different people, one being a survivor, which is heartbreaking.
And I'm not a practitioner.
The most I can do is refer to local resource or to pastoral care or to counseling resource. That's appropriate.
But then in almost every venue that I speak, and so that means it's prevalent, somebody will come up and say, we support this organization. And I don't have a name for this organization. It's a different name every time.
But what's consistent is the location. It's always a location that would never, would never be inspected.
And then it's the activity. These are the people who are kicking down doors, taking names, employing former Navy seals and then some outlandish number.
They're rescuing this many hundred girls per year.
And it's in every venue that I speak. And somebody will come and say, this is what we're giving our money to. It's nice what you do.
And I don't lament that their resources aren't coming our way. I would just hope that their resources are actually going to fundamentally real work and best practice work. And so we might even get somebody who says they're doing operations like that in Indonesia, which is where we primarily work.
And I think we know just about everybody and we're certainly not aware of work as such. And the State Department is furthermore not aware.
And so I would hazard to say that most who would support these rescue narratives don't have the opportunity to check in and look under the hood of the actual organizations and their work and an examination of their numbers. But it's the narrative that's out there. And obviously big stories like Sound of Freedom, which has come under severe scrutiny both in terms of person and story and frankly and organization.
Those are hard narratives to, I won't say compete with, but to live against the backdrop of where it's almost, it's almost more generative to have the taken narrative out there because everybody knows it's fictional, but that it could be true and that it just generally raises awareness, say, oh, I think I understand a little bit because of the personal nature of it.
But I think that the biggest problem in our field, and John could speak to this as well as anybody, is the rescue narrative, the hero narrative, the, the Westerner going into the blighted place and playing superhero and that, that somehow plays when just you describe the activity. And the activity itself would be illegal in almost all venues.
[00:07:52] Speaker C: Yeah, that's so interesting. Mike, I'm curious, you know, if you were to reshape the narrative that's primarily out there, what would it be and what do you think would be a more productive narrative to have in this space?
[00:08:09] Speaker B: Yeah, the narrative as it stands, the hero, rescue narrative puts all the value on the hero.
And the narrative needs to be reshaped to the person, to the one, to the image bearer, that all of us are worth everything that Jesus did on the cross.
And so Jesus is the hero of the story and then the survivor is the hero of the story. That's the, the reshaping of the narrative that, you know, for it to be gospel work.
I think that that's the, the narrative you want to live under.
I, I would get bored talking about myself for too long, you know, but I can talk about these precious faces I get to look into all day long, you know, and you know, when I'm tired, I just have to look into the face of somebody who it matters to and see that they're rebuilding their own lives. They're the, you know, the most important advocate outside of Jesus for themselves is themselves and that they have the agency and their future to rebuild and that it's, it's their own narrative, if you will, that is taking form and shape in a generative way.
[00:09:30] Speaker C: Yeah, John, maybe I'll, I'll spin that question on you as well. Why do you think prevention often gets overlooked or is dismissed in the anti trafficking space?
[00:09:42] Speaker A: One of the reasons I think is, is, I mean, it's not really easy to measure the effectiveness of prevention.
You know, it's not easy to measure human trafficking at all. In fact, there's, yeah, there's only one organization that does measure the prevalence of slavery around the world.
But, you know, generally the. The common prevention strategies that are used to fight human trafficking are, number one, job creation, that's. But, you know, you can never really do it at a sufficient scale to, you know, really affect the prevalence of. Of slavery or human trafficking. And two, you can never know for sure that any particular individual would otherwise have been trafficked. And so the other common strategy that's used is awareness. You know, making people aware about human trafficking, educating people. And of course, that's a good thing to do, but it's hard to know if it's actually reducing trafficking. And, you know, there's been quite a bit of research has been done on this.
What the research says is awareness campaigns work to boost people's knowledge of trafficking, and it can modestly shift attitudes and intentions. But those changes are rarely sustained in a way that translates into a measurable reduction of trafficking. So I think it's possible and worthwhile to keep studying what works and what doesn't work with awareness campaigns. Someday somebody might find a scalable awareness strategy that works at reducing human trafficking. But there is one type of awareness that works. If you can intercept someone who's in the process of being trafficked and make them aware about it, and you can change their attitude and intention through awareness, that would be an example of tangible, measurable prevention. And, and that's what transit monitoring is. It's awareness. Targeted individuals who are in the process of being trafficked. And it works. You know, we often say it's the world's only tangible human trafficking prevention strategy.
So we believe that. That it's a uniquely effective way to fight human trafficking.
[00:11:47] Speaker B: I think too, if I can add to that, to say that, you know, with.
I think that too many sort of fish get thrown into the bucket of that which gets defined as prevention.
I don't know if education awareness is frontline prevention. I think it's education awareness.
But we're in a metrically driven environment.
If you take in an auditorium of 500 teenagers, that's a big metric.
And then an organization can put that number out as a prevention number.
But I think it's an education and awareness number, and that's valuable in and of itself. But I think you devalue it. When you call it prevention. You're talking about with love, justice, and the transit monitoring. That's operational prevention, but it's a. It's a hybrid of actual prevention and intervention, because obviously you have an intervention that's taking place before atrocities happen, but it's an intervention nonetheless.
Our prevention work outside of our Partnership with you guys is, is in community development, which can have sort of a squishy definition, but it's getting severely compromised kids into school. And then we know for a fact that if a child in a blighted neighborhood, in a slum is in school, and that's a regularly case managed situation, the traffickers have actually informed that they leave those kids alone because they know somebody's paying attention to that. That's a prevention number for us.
And the thing is that those numbers are about the size of our transit monitoring numbers. They're not giant numbers, except that they're actual preventions.
[00:14:02] Speaker C: Yeah.
John, I think what would be interesting to touch on is that some people dismiss trafficking prevention or say that it's not measurable.
And how would you agree or disagree with that? And why?
Particularly as it relates to the transit monitoring model that we have.
[00:14:28] Speaker A: Yeah, well, I mean, when we intercept someone who's in the process of being trafficked, like as Mike said, that's one case of tangible prevention. That's someone who would have been trafficked but wasn't because of our intervention. And we, we think of it in terms of a. But for test, we, we want to count as impact. You know, if, if someone but for our intervention would have been trafficked, but they were not because of the intervention, that would be, you know, that's tangible prevention. That's the kind of impact that we try to aim for. And, and honestly, if you take somebody who's, who would otherwise have been trafficked and make it so that they are not, that is a significant impact in somebody's life. That's something that if it was my family or if it was my loved ones who are about to be trafficked, I'd give just about everything I have to prevent that from being happened, from happening.
So, you know, the impact that we measure as you know, is, is intercepts that someone we believe is in the process of being trafficked or at high risk and then they're prevented because of our intervention. And you know, our teams around the world do that about 80 times every day.
And then the other type of impact that we measure is arrest someone, a suspect who's arrested for crime, surrounding our work with trafficking victims. And that happens about once a day.
And so, but even those are lead indicators, you know, that they're. Because we, you don't know, like maybe you, you intercept one person, someone else is trafficked in their place or. But I mean, because what we really want to do and what we're really aiming to do is reduce how Much trafficking is happening. And so one of the ways we define human trafficking is moving someone into slavery. So what we really want to do is reduce the number of people living in slavery in the world. And Mike, I don't think you've heard this, but we just discovered this November that in each of the countries that we started working in prior to 2022, the number of slaves, and there's 16 of them, and each of those 16 countries saw the prevalence of slavery decline by an average of 9% per year over the course of our work, while the rest of the world has seen an increase on average of 11 and a half percent per year.
[00:16:39] Speaker B: Yeah, and so Hannah, where I, where I was able to actually speak about Love Justice's work was, I think it was last year at the, at one of the Accord executive retreats when I just, and I think that John and I were the only anti trafficking representatives in the room and just said, you know, a lot of people talk about stopping trafficking, but most of us are just dealing with the consequences of it.
Even frontline aftercare like we do, we're dealing with the consequences, but transit monitoring is stopping it.
You know, and, and the thing is you've got, you got a technology and you have people that you've trained to do this work and, and the combination of those two things and, and of course government cooperation and so on, it's the only thing that I know of that's stopping it. And there are orgs doing good stopping work out there. The IJM is great, of course, and they're doing very high level governmental work.
But as for the, you know, boots on the ground, stopping in its tracks, I think this, this activity, this transit monitoring activity is just profoundly good.
[00:17:59] Speaker C: Mike, I want to go a little bit maybe in a, in a different direction than maybe we originally planned because I think it's really important for, like you said, for people to hear a different narrative and to hear one that is, you know, the least of these, that we're trying to serve them centric.
And if you were in light of transit monitoring and what listeners might not know is that Compassion first partners with Love justice in Indonesia, where transit monitoring is one of the activities that you guys sponsor in collaboration with us.
And so if you were to kind of rewrite the narrative to make the pitch for why someone should get involved.
[00:18:43] Speaker B: In.
[00:18:45] Speaker C: The transit monitoring work of Compassion First Love justice, what would that pitch be? And like clearly lay out, like who's the hero? How are they coming into this? And who, who's, who's like the bottom line and why that's important. Like, I think it. Yeah, I just think it would be really helpful to hear, like a redefinition of that narrative from a perspective that you think is really valuable.
[00:19:13] Speaker B: Well, let me say first that, I mean, there's a rub to this in that we've done two things preventatively along this pipeline that we're partnered with Love justice on. And it's North Sulawesi to Papua, and it's maritime.
It is just an incredibly inexpensive way to move humans are these slums on water, these massive people ferries.
And so we've been aware of the pipeline because half, more than half of our girls that we've taken care of who've been repatriated to North Sulawesi have been rescued by police in Papua.
And So back in 2013, with a lot of help from the State Department, the FBI, doj, we did some police and prosecutorial training.
And the head of the PPA unit in Papua, which is the investigative unit charged with protecting women and children, told us in 2015 that they had seen a 50% reduction in the trafficking of underage girls from North Sulawesi to Papua. So that's crimping a pipeline.
And then when we introduced transit monitoring, I think post2020, right then we got word through the grapevine that the brothels could no longer get minor girls off the boats, period. So we've crushed a pipeline, at least in a maritime sense. And then we had to go to work on getting ourselves established in the airport, which took two years of governmental work, it took two years of policy, I mean, just pounding sand, and finally got into the airport. So we crushed this maritime pipeline and we've made it now more expensive to traffic girls, you know, on this sort of.
In this supply and demand relationship.
And so here's the practical rub is that, you know, John mentions the measurables are hard.
Well, the measurables get really hard when we have to keep that transit monitoring open in the port. We have to keep it open because if we close it, you know, hey, okay, we've crushed a pipeline. There's no if we close it, then it reopens.
And so we have to be satisfied with zero intercepts from now until Jesus comes back and know that it's good work.
And so.
And so if you were to ask our, our director on the ground what motivates him, this is his gospel work. If, if you sit down and ask him, it's his gospel work. And he's seen everything from minor girls on these boats to now in the airport the most of the intercepts are labor trafficking intercepts, young men and women that are getting trafficked to Cambodia from North Sulawesi.
And he's this whole spectrum and every question that I ask him, he has a ministerial response to.
And so this is not a guy pastoring from a pulpit.
It's a guy living out his gospel in a thankless job, mostly up in the middle of the night because that's when the ferries run or building his life and schedule around when the planes take off. And.
And so, you know, to me, he is indeed a hero, but his perspective is the value of the one that he gets to help and then seeing through. Sometimes, you know, somebody can be so convinced of the narrative of why they're moving that they're not interested in your help, but law enforcement's now involved and seeing through that and, you know, seeing somebody who has been helped, even upset with him and his team because they've helped, and knowing that the long game will.
Will cause this person to understand correctly what's going on, I think that's just selfless.
[00:23:41] Speaker C: Yeah, definitely.
We.
Well, two things. One, we've talked about how just the presence of our staff in the field is almost like a deterrent effect.
John, feel free to chime in here. But just like simply being there almost prevents more from happening because of the risk of being caught.
And then the second point that I think you touched on, that we're excited in a future episode to do, which is to talk to our monitors, and you said it so well of like, our monitors are the heroes on the front lines. It's a thankless job. They're spending everything they've got on behalf of the least of these to. And the least of these and those who they regard as their brothers and sisters in Christ and will go to the ends of the earth to do whatever on behalf of them.
And I think you're a project manager who I've. I've had the pleasure of training and meeting is a wonderful embodiment of that. And we're just excited to have that later on in the season, get the chance to interview some, some monitors. John, any. Anything you want to add there?
[00:24:51] Speaker A: First of all, I love Crush the Pipeline. That's a. That's. That's going to make it its way into the vernacular of love, justice. It's a good, It's a good metaphor. Like, it's about the power of disruption, you know, like.
And, you know, there's examples where, especially where people are able to do something without disruption. And then you introduce a little Bit of disruption. It can go a long ways. And like a single police car parked along, you know, a highway visibly can drastically reduce speeding, or a single security camera can reduce shoplifting, or health inspections can. Can really increase compliance. And it's, you know, the metaphor we've been thinking about recently is, you know, transit monitoring is the police car parked along the hitherto unpoliced highways of enslavement.
So. Yeah, I appreciate that. But crush. And then the idea of just crushing the pipeline, that's what we believe. I mean, it's.
[00:25:45] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:25:46] Speaker B: You know, in the world, but it's unique in Indonesia.
I know you guys, I think that you're more heavyweight on airports than you are ports, water ports, or seaports. I don't know that for sure. I'm just. I'm guessing.
But you look at the geography of Indonesia and we need a hundred of these seaport transit monitoring operations. We need a hundred. I mean, it's, you know, the, the constellation of ferry travel and people ferry travel.
It just. These islands are porous.
And I mean, if you wanted to create a strategy to stop it, you'd pour millions of dollars into a transit monitoring operation, every single ferry port, starting with Java, and just go from there. And it would be so effective.
I wish we had the money.
[00:26:57] Speaker A: Am I right? Isn't Indonesia the fourth most populous country in the world?
[00:27:01] Speaker B: Yeah, and Java is the most populous island in the world, about 40 million people or more.
[00:27:09] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:27:12] Speaker B: It is. And I mean, the thing is, is that, you know, we, We. We lament right or wrong, we lament border issues in America.
There, There's.
We.
We don't have any imagination to comprehend the unmanageability of an island nation, you know, with, with thousands and thousands of islands.
[00:27:41] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
John, I'll. I'll have you answer maybe a similar question that I had my. Had Mike answer. And that's just. People tend to be more emotionally drawn to resc.
Why do you think that is? Is it a problem? And how can we help people truly understand what's being prevented when they support upstream interventions like transit monitoring?
[00:28:07] Speaker A: Well, it's hard.
I mean, the story of a rescue, it's. It is, it is kind of a hero story. It's an exciting story. It's an action story.
And it's also like a story where you, you get to know these. I mean, it's a window into the really specific terrible things that happen to people that really. That happens to victims of human trafficking and that stuff. I mean, it breaks people hearts because it's so heartbreaking. It's, you know, it's rightly that people's hearts are broken when they hear those things.
And it's about the horrible things that happen to people when, who are enslaved, but when you intercept someone who that doesn't happen to, but it otherwise would have, you know, that it's a story about a crisis averted. You know, it's a, it's a story about, you know, something that didn't happen. And so there's no details about what it is. And so some of our stories are like five people intercepted, 10 people intercepted, you know, and that's not exactly the most compelling story to tell over and over again. You know, it's a story of something that did not not but otherwise would have happened. So, and it's, it's really hard to speak about that in a way that's both accurate and compelling.
You know, you can, you can just take and say, oh, this, all this, that and the other terrible thing that does really happen would have happened, but you don' know that, so it wouldn't be accurate. You know, and so what you can say accurately is, is not that much. You know, the truth is we don't know exactly what terrible circumstances a given person would have ended up in and, but we know enough about human trafficking to know that it's really terrible. It's always terrible. It's never not really terrible. And so, you know, I don't think there are many examples that are not just gut wrenching.
So I, I don't know. I think we need to help connect people, connect it in their minds the realities and of the horrors of human trafficking with these little uplifting stories about real precious people who almost had that happen to them but didn't.
And, and I, I think our, our team has found some really creative ways to tell that story over the years.
And I think it's just something that we just need to keep pressing into and improving.
[00:30:12] Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah.
Mike, from your Aftercare experience, could you share a story that illustrates what's at stuff stake when prevention doesn't happen? In that, in that spirit of what John just shared.
[00:30:26] Speaker B: Well, here's the thing is even with Frontline Aftercare, we, we're up against the same challenges because if you're hearing too specific of a story that's, you know, somewhat time adjacent to rescue of a minor, you're listening to somebody who doesn't adhere to the standards of ethical storytelling.
And most of the hero stories are far afield from any form of ethical storytelling.
And so, but I can say this generally that, you know, I know some opaque details about, in generalities, about girls who've been in our care.
I've never looked at a case file.
It's none of my business. I know that there are six criteria that bring a girl into compassion. First, aftercare.
She has to be a girl. She has to be under the age of 18.
She has to have been sexually trafficked, have suffered multiple sexual trauma, been legally rescued by police, and a six criteria that it's not safe for her to go home.
We would much rather care for her in her home environment, in a mom and dad household than in an aftercare center, even though all of the resources of that aftercare center are exceptional.
And so you're guaranteed, if a girl comes through our doors, she has suffered multiple sexual trauma and you're talking about a minimum of two years to see things put back together for her. Two years. On average, they're two years behind in school, you know, so catch up education becomes just a, an enjoined battle with us and with the girl in our care.
And then there's this cultural thing.
This happened to you, therefore you did this, therefore this is who you are. And therefore somehow it's also your future.
And none of those things are true, you know, except for the fact that this happened to you. That's true. But as far as that defining somebody's future, that's a huge internal narrative that's culturally enforced to break away from. And so let me sort of give you the other side of the coin though.
We had a girl and I know a bit of her story because she is an adult now and she tells her own story.
And she came to us, I think, when she was 13 years old. And as a pastor, let me say that her story, and it's about all I'm going to say about it, would give her reason to never trust me because I am a pastor.
And so you can connect the dots on that in terms of her trafficking story. It's a horrifying situation that she was rescued from.
Incredibly smart. When I met her, she was fluent in English already, but also pretty standoffish with everybody. And I remember a couple visits and just trying to get to know her a little bit. In between a couple of those visits, she had cut off all of her hair.
And that was not an act of self harm, it was an act of defiance. It was just, you know, stay away, everybody stay away.
And, you know, as she started to work through the program and realize that she was safe and that she was loved and then coming into an intersection of this question that we ask, which we ask this question of all of our own children and grandchildren. What do you want to be when you grow up? And that's just even asking that question of our three year old children, you know, we're engaging something designed by God. We're engaging the imago DEI that the answer to that question is going to change a million times. But we're teaching our kids that they should be dreaming.
And that is the threshold of stabilization. By the way, when a girl starts to think about the future in a healthy and positive way, she has stabilized.
And so asking that question, what do you want to be when you grow up? And I'm going to say it was about eight or 10 years ago that we became unsatisfied with the results, the yield on what was available for survivors in recovery.
And that's when we started asking that question. To say that work that doesn't require education is not necessarily a static outcome. That's good.
What about work that requires an education?
What if somebody's answer to a question, what do you want to be when you grow up includes a college education?
And we, we made a commitment to not flinch at the answers. And so we started sending girls to college several years ago. You know, they catch up, they graduate from high school and they go to colleges of their choosing. And this particular girl wanted to be a doctor.
And, and as I said, she's very bright.
And in February of this year, she graduated from medical school and she's in her internships now or rotations. And, and I'm telling you, she's got a plan and she realized it for herself. And so it was, it was a long, hard journey that she had to own.
[00:36:07] Speaker C: Yeah, thanks for sharing that, Mike.
You've seen the headlines, you've heard the stories.
Children are being trafficked every single day. And everything in you says this has to stop.
But rescuing kids after exploitation is never enough. If it were your child, would you sleep soundly knowing that they might be found after being taken? Or would you want to know that they were never taken at all? At Love justice, we've spent the past 20 years building a proven model to stop trafficking before it happens. Training local monitors, intercepting at key border points, and reuniting kids with their families. We can do this for $112 per person intercepted. But there are more borders, more children, more lives at risk than we can reach right now. That's where you come in. Join Project Beautiful, our monthly giving community, and stop trafficking before it starts. Visit projectbeautiful.org Mike, in your opinion, what would need to change in messaging, funding or donor priorities for prevention to take center stage at the anti trafficking movement? And maybe not prevention as a banner, but specifically transit monitoring. And what gives you hope that strategies like transit monitoring could actually scale globally and change the trajectory of this fight?
[00:37:27] Speaker B: I think it's a bigger question than just transit monitoring. I think it's our relationship with money and metrics and the poor.
And I think that we've had some amazingly wonderful organizations grow up in the last several decades in the United States that have inadvertently communicated that poverty can be solved for a very small amount of money every month.
And the fact is that these problems are extremely expensive.
And so I think that we sort of, we go down even a spiritual rabbit hole that we don't mean to when we start dealing in metrics. And there's this. I remember speaking to a group of national church leaders and there'd been a lot of discussion about spiritual metrics. Metrics, how many people got saved, how many people got baptized, and so on.
And I just said, in the opening of my remarks, I said, you know, the metrics of earth will always be numbers, but the metrics of heaven will always be names. And you go from that which you can measure to that which is immeasurable and priceless.
And we all know from just situations adjacent or as a part of our own families that the problems that create poverty are extremely expensive. Addiction or endemic poverty, or generational poverty, or situations that can't be solved one on one by a small amount of money every month.
They're extremely expensive. But at some point, and there's some theory around this, but at some point we became so metrically driven in our spiritual activity that it gets us off onto the wrong narratives.
And so I think that, I think that it starts with understanding the value of the imago DEI in every person.
And then we'll understand it in the worker, and then we'll understand it in the work.
And that when we, as a spiritual person, as a person who walks with Jesus, when I understand that almsgiving and foot washing are almost up there in sacramental value land because it brings us close to the Christ, that that's when we'll have a better understanding of the value of these things that maybe don't flash at us at eye level on the sale shelf, you know, as high value when they are of the highest value. And the thing is, is that those are the, those are the gems we dig for.
And I'll say this Too like you can't, you can't compare John and I have a fellowship with a bunch of leaders who do amazing work. Every one of them does amazing work.
And, and you can't, you can't compare the high value of being in those rooms with those people. And we should all be competitors by the way.
We should all be thinking that each other's taking each other's money and we're not. We love each other and we serve each other well.
And the gem. I mean the, the just the, the pure gold of what that interaction is, is a piece of heaven. And, and if we understood, you know, I think a little more Jesus theology of the poor and the biblical theology of the poor, which is voluminous that we understand the heart of God and then we, we stop wrongly valuing things and placing proper value on, on even the work that we get to do.
[00:41:33] Speaker C: John, what about you?
[00:41:38] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean I appreciate everything you shared there, Mike. And, and there's, yeah, I, the Cord Network has been for me just a revelation of blessedness has been so great connecting with you and other leaders there and, and seeing how much yeah, all God is doing in and through his people around the world.
And, but, and I think it's also a matter of like I, I feel we should spur each other on to greater and greater impact. I think that is what'. What, what happens there. And, and but you know, there's a room, there's obviously a need for and room for all kinds of, of different, different things. You know, like we all have different gifts, we have and there's tons of needs in the world and we all should be striving to make the greatest impact we can in the ways that we can.
But in terms of the strategies that are, that are fighting human trafficking, you know, I mean there is also a different. There, there is such a thing where there are some things that are not effective. You know, like there are some things that are harmful, there are some things that are, that are. There is a range of effectiveness. And in this, in the scope of strategy to fight human trafficking, the vast majority of the resources are, are either going to these non, non tangible prevention strategies like awareness and job creation or you have, you know, like you, you have the tangible, but it doesn't actually prevent, you know, like rescue, you know, and that's the big, that's the biggest hero story that's out there all over the place. And all these things have a place for sure.
You know, and there's tons of great organizations like Compassion first that does amazing work in Indonesia. And there's, there's great organizations that, that do aftercare and rescue and, and, and awareness. Although awareness is one where I don't have in mind a particular organization I think of with that. But I'm sure there are.
But the transit monitoring is underfunded.
It is not getting a fraction of the resources that are out there. And I'm convinced, as Mike, you were the one that first were saying that.
I don't know, I'm going to utter out loud some of the kind things that you have said about the effectiveness of transit monitoring, including at the Accord Network. But we do feel it's a uniquely effective strategy.
And so we would need more transit monitoring. We need more partners like Mike and Compassion first.
And there's different ways we can partner together to do it. One option is that we would pay to do transit monitoring. You'd be our partner. Another option is we would have an agreement with you and we would show you how to do transit monitoring. As we've done with Mike, we share those tools. And so if anybody listening knows any organizations that are looking for an effective way to fight human trafficking, we'd love to hear from them and share with them what we've learned and find ways to work together to make the greatest impact we can.
[00:44:36] Speaker C: Yeah. Thanks John. And thank you guys both for just taking the time to share your insights and your wisdom. And Mike, you offer such a unique perspective being in this space and specifically in the aftercare space that I think just brings a richness to the conversations that we're having about how to fight the world's greatest injustices.
To really appreciate your time and your wisdom and just the value that you bring and always you as well, John.
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