Your Voice Matters

By Holly Burkhalter, IJM VP of Government Relations

Washington, D.C., is our nation’s capitol but it is still very much a Southern city. Last month, two and a half feet of snow paralyzed the city, closing the subway system, public schools and the federal government. We at IJM’s headquarters are back at our desks now, working to support our colleagues and our clients overseas. Every day I hear of the efforts of IJM’s undercover investigators helping local police to locate young women and girls in sexual slavery and remove them to safety and recovery. Their work matters. Every successful intervention saves lives, and it builds capacity within local governments to combat the trade in human beings.

My job at International Justice Mission, as Vice President for Government Relations, is to promote ways that the United States government can support justice for the poorest around the world through diplomacy and foreign assistance. We get a lot of help from our IJM friends around the United States. On Inauguration Day a year ago, we at IJM invited our supporters to sign a letter to President Obama, urging him to make slavery eradication a priority during his first year in office. We delivered that letter to the White House with 7,500 signatures.

This year, we are inviting our friends around the U.S. to again sign a letter to President Obama, thanking him for naming anti-trafficking activists to key government positions, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. We are also calling upon the president to help combat child trafficking and exploitation in Haiti, where orphaned and homeless children are particularly vulnerable, and to invest significant foreign assistance into bolstering fragile justice systems so that foreign governments can better enforce their own laws and protect women and children from violent abuse.

We have over 9,700 names on the letter, and are hoping to gather as many as 20,000 before we deliver the letter to the White House this month.

Your voice matters. If you haven’t signed the letter, please do. If you have, how about asking three friends to join you? It may not seem like much, but it matters a great deal to policy makers making tough foreign policy decisions when tens of thousands of Americans tell them that the U.S. can and should help eradicate modern-day slavery around the world.

SIGN THE LETTER NOW.