Each year, the local Long Beach Brave chapter hosts up to 700 girls with a life-changing day that intends to instill a message of hope, love, value and purpose. Long Beach is one of 21 Brave Global chapters in the U.S., and there are several international chapters as well.īrave empowerment events work to illustrate each young person’s sense of identity, value and belonging. “We took the recipe and then said, how can we help other communities - and that’s what we’ve been doing.”īrave Global officially became a nonprofit in 2017, according to its website, in order to invite and equip communities across the country and the globe to reach their most at-risk youth through their events, Brave Circle small groups, mentoring opportunities, workshops and camps. “We took the recipe that had already been proven in Long Beach as a very catalytic event,” Strickland said.
“I remember, for years,” she said, “thinking (how things would be different) if only I could have got there first.” Strickland has spent about two decades helping women transition out of trafficking and forced sex work, and during that time, she began to notice a pattern: Many of the women used to be in the foster care system or in an abandonment situation. “It’s an empowering, inspiring, catalytic force for good.”
“Brave Global equips communities to reach vulnerable girls before they are trafficked,” Danielle Strickland, co-founder of the nonprofit, said in a recent interview. The organization has also reported that more than 60% of sex trafficking victims have spent time in the child welfare system. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, in a 2022 report, estimated that about 19% of children and youth who ran away from foster care likely experienced sex trafficking. Students transform their stories of violence into living monologues, raps, and theater pieces into order to share them with their peers and the larger community.The mission of the Long Beach nonprofit Brave Global is to connect with and empower vulnerable youth with the much-needed tools to join the fight against exploitation and human trafficking.īrave Global works with underserved youth populations, such as those in foster care, probationary systems, and runaway and homeless youth, according to its website, because those folks are likely to experience instability that can leave them vulnerable to exploitation. Then the students broke down the events to understand the social determinants of the violent outcome and the physical environment where the violence took place. For example, participants worked through a group exercise where they identify the important events leading to violent outcomes they have experienced. Teens from this neighborhood worked with a faculty member to identify root causes of violence and bring together community members and leaders to address these causes. Instead of focusing on individual behavior change, Project BRAVE partnered with community, school and church organizations to focus on conditions in the social and physical environment that foster violence. The project viewed violence as a community-level problem. Project BRAVE (Building and Revitalizing an Anti-Violence Environment) was designed to reduce teen violence in three New Orleans neighborhoods that were marked with high rates of violence and poverty.
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