By Holly Burkhalter, Vice President for Government Relations

We at IJM headquarters and around the world got a huge boost during the Weekend to End Slavery (November 14-15), when more than 300 friends hosted film screenings in homes, churches, theatres and dorm rooms to view IJM’s new documentary film, At the End of Slavery. The 31-minute documentary, produced by IJM’s Ted Haddock and narrated by Danny Glover, is a breathtaking and heart-wrenching look at modern-day slavery, through the eyes of IJM’s own clients in India, Cambodia and the Philippines. But it presents an uplifting and profoundly optimistic picture of how this enduring crime can be combated: by empowering public justice systems to rescue the victims and apprehend the perpetrators.

At the End of Slavery is a dream come true for IJM’s Justice Campaigns. We needed a tool to educate and animate IJM’s friends around the country that they could use, in turn, to engage their own friends, colleagues and family members in the modern-day slavery abolition movement. And that is exactly what has happened.

And there are many great house parties yet to come! In some cases, the "house" is a church. Mt. Zion Ministries Church in Utica New York, for example, is hosting a screening of At the End of Slavery for 800 people and showing it to several thousand young people at their annual youth conference.

One of our goals for the film is for our house party hosts to encourage their friends to sign Abolition Postcards expressing support for legislation called the Child Protection Compact Act and send them to their Senators and Members of Congress. These Abolition Postcards have been included in each house party box kit IJM sends to hosts – we’ve sent some 4,500 kits to date!

The Child Protection Compact Act (CPCA), if enacted, would provide additional funds for the State Department Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons (G/TIP) and give G/TIP officials the authority to work with foreign governments on strategies to eliminate child trafficking.

The CPCA has been introduced in the House of Representatives and now has eighty-eight cosponsors. It is soon to be introduced in the Senate. This bill could benefit many more children like those that IJM helps remove from brothels, brick kilns and rice mills by providing more resources for our work and that of other NGOs. If we had thousands of CPCA postcards pouring into Washington from every state, Congress would definitely take notice!

One of the things I like best about my job is seeing what our friends around the country are accomplishing. My colleague Erica just forwarded me a note from IJM friends in Georgia who met with their Congressman, Rep. Tom Price, during the August Congressional recess. Our friends discussed the bill with the Congressman, who said that he’d consider it. This week, they got the good news from the Congressman’s staffer that he has agreed to support the bill as a co-sponsor. We are grateful to the Congressman, and to our friends in Georgia.

Americans from all points on the political spectrum are sometimes frustrated at officials in Washington. But from where I sit, democracy is working well. IJM’s friends and supporters across the United States are telling Congress that they care about trafficking and modern-day slavery, and they want them to do something about it. It looks like Congress is listening.

Keep up the good work!