186 – Building a Coalition and Building Capacity

This episode is brought to you by Vanguard University and the Global Center for Women and Justice, who offer an incredible anti-human trafficking certificate. Whether you're a frontline responder, a social worker, in the ministry, a healthcare provider, or simply a community member who wants to help, this program is built for you. Head over to gcwj.org/ahtc to take the next step and apply today. 

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Dr. Sandie Morgan and Dave Stachowiak discuss the value of collaboration with Helen Sworn, founder of the Chab Dai organization in Cambodia. Helen has provided a replicable framework that emphasizes the need for partnership in order to end human trafficking.

Key Point

• Chab Dai established a coalition as a response to the rapid but uncoordinated growth of anti-trafficking individuals and organizations trying to combat the issue. The framework for being part of the coalition includes legal government registration as a way to provide accountability and child protection policies in order to ensure no harm to victims.
• Helen speaks of the significance of collaboration, “I think that I have to kind of start with the problem that we’re addressing. And I truly believe that the reason that people are able to be trafficked and exploited all over the world, and it’s so interconnected around the world, is because those criminals that are behind it are super well networked. And that they don’t need to like each other, they don’t need to be friends, but actually, they have a common vision and that enables them to focus on their networking… And so, for us, collaboration has to underpin every single thing that we do.”
• Finding common ground is how we can collaborate. Our common ground is not about serving these institutions, it’s ultimately about serving those who we have set out to serve.
• Building a movement is important because this issue is going to outlast our lives and maybe even organizations. But the movement is our legacy, so in building the movement we have to focus on collaboration and capacity.
  • Collaboration: There is no one sector that can address this problem, so people need have a multidisciplinary view on it.
  • Capacity: In order to hold each other accountable, we must have professional standards that are a guiding set of principles, rather than a set of rules, that can be adapted to fit within specific contexts.
• 5 Pillars in Chab Dai’s strategic plan:
  • Coalition and Capacity
  • Prevention and Protection
  • Justice and Client Care
  • Advocacy
  • Research

Resources

• Chab Dai
• Butterfly Longitudinal Research
• Ensure Justice

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Transcript

Dave: [00:00:01] You’re listening to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast. This is episode number 186, Building a Coalition and Building Capacity.

Production Credits: [00:00:10] Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Dave: [00:00:30] Welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast. My name is Dave Stachowiak.

Sandie: [00:00:35] And my name is Sandie Morgan.

Dave: [00:00:38] And this is the show where we empower you to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference in ending human trafficking. Sandie, we often talk about the power of partnerships on the show and today a conversation with someone who is a tremendous leader in this way.

Sandie: [00:00:58] Well, I am so, excited to introduce my dear friend and colleague, Helen Sworn. She is the founder of Chab Dai and absolutely has been a model for me to follow how she does international programming, how she builds partnerships. And so, we’re just going to dive right in, Helen, and welcome you to the show.

Helen: [00:01:23] Thank you very much. It’s great to be on is Sandie, with you.

Sandie: [00:01:26] OK. And for those of you who just heard Helen for the first time, she’s located in the UK, but she has lived in Cambodia for many years as well. So, tell us about Chab Dai and kind of the meaning and the history.

Helen: [00:01:44] Sure, so, Chab Dai in the Cambodian language means “joining hands”. And that really underpins the entire ethos and foundation and practice of everything that we do as an organization whether we’re doing prevention work, whether we’re doing our legal work, whether we’re working within the coalition, whether we’re doing research or advocacy, joining hands is how we do it.

Sandie: [00:02:17] Tell me just a little bit about how you came to be in Cambodia.

Helen: [00:02:23] So, yes very long story cut very short. I had been working for a number of years in a very kind of cutthroat business world in the UK and my husband and I kind of came to faith and really had a sense that we wanted to move outside that comfort zone and go into some type of full-time Christian work. So, we thought well we’d better go and study about this. So, we took ourselves off to seminary for three years and it was while we were there that we really got a heart initially to work with street kids and homeless youth and really Southeast Asia opened up for us. We went there for an internship and then moved there at the beginning of 1999 with a small mission agency from the UK with our two children. Our daughter at the time was four and our son was six months old. So, yes, we were those crazy ones that I think our families were somewhat shocked at and the work that we were going to do. My husband went to set up a vocational training school in I.T. and I actually went with my kind of research and strategic planning background to help the organization do its strategy for the next couple of years and in the work that it was doing. So, that was what took us out there originally.

Sandie: [00:03:48] And then I think what kept you there was what started Chab Dai right?

Helen: [00:03:57] Yeah. What kept me there was a very strong vision that God gave me on a physical journey that I took from Phnom Penh up to the Thai Cambodia border later on in the year 1999. And we had seen a lot of street kids and families going missing and we couldn’t work out what was happening. We really didn’t have the language ourselves or even of human trafficking. We’re just trying to work out what happened to these kids. So, I took a very challenging journey in a very old Russian prop plane that had chickens in the aisle that I did not know whether we were going to get there safely. To then in a very old Land Cruiser in these like horrendous roads that something of which I had never seen the light of day before. So, it got to the border area and started to see these children being traded through the border into them finding out what happened. And many of them of which we now call it human trafficking was being traded through the border. Many of them going into Thailand as beggars. I can reme...