Not For Sale Campaign + USCRI

In response to Sarah's post, I saw that site too! It looks really cool, and they have programs in the summer about an Academy to become a certified investigator for tracking cases of human trafficking. However, I think the academy is in California, and a bit pricey. If you can, I think it'd be a great experience! I also think the certification is specific to that organization, so you'd be able to work with them in the future!

On another note, I'm volunteering at this place on Mondays called the United States Committee for Refugees and Immigrants. Some of the immigrants that are coming over are also victims of slavery in the form of forced labor. I'm waiting to hear from a woman there about any more information about slavery in our area that she might have.

Not For Sale: Ending Human Trafficking and Slavery

Hey!

While searching for more information on modern-day slavery, I found this website. It has many interesting facts and several articles about human trafficking all over the world, maps showing areas of the US where trafficking rings have been found, plus many ways in which groups can contribute to stop it, such as buying clothes and merchandise from "Freedom Store", and it also has interesting articles about Fair Trade Chocolate.

http://www.notforsalecampaign.org/Default.aspx

Voulnteers Needed

Hey Guys,

Here is an article from Times Union about the Refugees in the area. They are in dire need of volunteers. While it is not directly related to slavery, it is certainly something we could do to get out there and help!

http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=774918&category=&BCCode=

Check One

This is just so people can see how their posts will look like...



"E. Benjamin Skinner

Born in 1976, Ben Skinner was raised in Wisconsin and northern Nigeria, where his father had served as a British colonial administrator. He first learned about slavery as a child in Quaker meeting. The Quakers, who believed that the divine spark animates every man, were the first abolitionists. Skinner’s Sunday school teachers spent as much time on Harriet Tubman and William Lloyd Garrison as they did on Moses and Jesus.

Skinner himself comes from abolitionist stock. His great-great-grandfather, Robert Pratt, served with the 1st Connecticut Artillery at the Siege of Petersburg, the ten-month campaign which bled white the Confederate Army and led to Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. Pratt’s uncle was a comb-maker too old to serve at the time, but not too old to make fiery antislavery speeches. When one of his distributors told him his abolitionist talk was hurting sales in the south, he exploded: “If they won’t buy my Yankee combs, then let them go lousy!”

In 2003, as a writer on assignment in Sudan for Newsweek International, Skinner met his first survivor of slavery. He had first flown in under enemy radar with an Evangelical group purporting to buy slaves en masse to secure their freedom. Afterwards, on his own, he hitched a ride on a U.N. Cessna to the frontlines of the north-south Sudanese civil war. There he met Muong Nyong. Like Skinner, Nyong was 27 at the time, and pondering what to do with the rest of his life. Unlike Skinner, he had spent the first part of that life in bondage.

After meeting Nyong, Skinner traveled the globe to find others like him. Scholars estimate the total number of modern-day slaves is greater than at any point in history. But the number means nothing, unless slavery means something. Skinner adopted a narrow definition: slaves are forced to work, under threat of violence, for no pay beyond subsistence.

Though there are more slaves today than ever before, finding them would prove the most daunting challenge of Skinner’s professional life. Slaves languish in shadows, kept hidden by violent traffickers and masters. Going undercover when necessary, Skinner infiltrated trafficking networks and slave quarries, urban child markets and illegal brothels. In the process, he became the first person in history to observe the sales of human beings on four continents."