Amirah, Inc. provides a refuge for those seeking to break free from exploitation and heal in community on their journey toward lasting hope.

In 2008, a small group of people, deeply impacted after reading a book on human trafficking, began speaking to different groups to raise awareness.  As they continued their research, they learned that concerted efforts were underway to create legislation, engage law enforcement, address demand and raise awareness; however, the most obvious unmet need was safe, stable housing providing whole-person aftercare.   In June 2009, the vision was born to create an organization that would provide restorative, trauma-sensitive whole-person care specifically for survivors.  The vision would center on providing safe homes for survivor recovery.  In July 2009, we chose the name “Amirah”, which in Persian means “daughter of the King” or “female leader”.  It reflects the sense of value and dignity that we seek to restore within those we serve. 

We spent 2009-2012 researching best practices and building an extensive network of friends, donors, partners, and volunteers.  With only a few organizations in the US providing this level of survivor aftercare, we collaborated with dozens of survivors, medical providers, legal advisors, trauma experts, therapists, program directors, and consultants in developing and focusing our program plans. 

In 2013, we crossed the threshold into implementing our program plans by offering Breaking Free educational support groups to survivors housed in substance abuse programs and opening a safe home providing comprehensive services for this population in New England.

Amirah’s safe home opened in October 2013. After four months of care, our first program participant began living on her own and supporting herself with a job of her choice. This client’s story included capacity-building trainings that resulted in a new victim identification, community member volunteers who evolved into part of her care team, and a founding vision for an anti-trafficking organization being proven effective. This story represents several accomplishments:

1. Building a community-based pipeline of services from victim identification through aftercare to reintegration
2. Opening of a 10-bed whole-person care safe home to provide comprehensive, wraparound care for 10 full-time program participants and temporary emergency shelter for 3 survivors
3. We were called a “national benchmark program” by the Boston-based Homeland Security Investigations Victim Assistance Coordinator.
4. Transition of our first client into a life she’s choosing to lead
5. Several key outputs measures:

• Trained over 250 service providers
• Served 55 survivors through our Breaking Free educational support groups
• Developed partnerships with 75 community partners and 45 professional service providers
• Hired our first Survivor Mentor to work with safe home residents and co-facilitate educational support groups

 Amirah's biggest immediate need is funding for the whole-person care program and additional staff to support operations in the safe home that will enable us to provide effective care for up to 10 women in the program.

The problem of Commercial Exploitation is pervasive throughout New England.  Given its hidden nature, numbers are difficult to track; but survivor and agency reports indicate that thousands of people in this region are being exploited.  Anti-trafficking agencies are just beginning to understand the factors that enable exploitation to persist and how to address them effectively.  The solution requires multiple strategies, inter-agency collaboration, and engaged communities; however, our state is just beginning to take action after new legislation was passed in 2011.  Aftercare has been identified as one of the least developed and most needed aspects of fighting Commercial Exploitation.

This expertise has been invaluable, as shown by the early success of our Breaking Free support groups and whole-person care safe home program.  Survivors in our programs have demonstrated tremendous progress in their restoration.

Amirah provides:

All this and more makes it easy for me to be glad and grateful to be connected with Amirah and to serve as the Chair of its Board of Directors. Amirah is a young organization, with great potential for growth and new opportunities. Our unique model of whole-person transformative care has now been proven effective and we’re working hard each day to grow and strengthen these programs. I trust that as more people become aware of the scale and scope of human trafficking--especially as more Americans come to understand that trafficking is in our own back yards--more will choose to support Amirah and its programs. We can not all go to Nepal or India to storm brothels, but most of us can do something to show care for and provide help to trafficking survivors. Amirah is the only program of its kind in all of New England. Isn't supporting the work of Amirah an opportunity you would find gratifying?

Commercial exploitation at its core is an issue that reflects a breakdown in our communities on many levels.  The solution, therefore, requires a whole-community response. 

Amirah has approached fundraising and partnerships with this in mind.  We have spoken to more than 250 groups and over 30,000 people, raising awareness and mobilizing individuals to utilize their personal, professional and community resources to combat trafficking activity and support survivors’ restoration in their local areas.

From 2009-2012, our fundraising focused on engaging individuals, groups and businesses in the community.  As a result, Amirah has built a collaborative network of over 75 community partners, 45 program partners, 175 volunteers and 550 donors. 

In 2012, one major donor contributed 36% of our total income, and the other 64% came from grassroots donors giving an average of $350 per donor for the year.  This ground-level approach has been strategic in establishing Amirah’s long-term sustainability and in creating a supportive community that will facilitate and enhance survivor restoration and reintegration.

Other Documents

Amirah works to be an effective partner in the movement to end human trafficking.

Human trafficking is a crime that takes many forms and functions, is prolific within our society, is unbeknownst to many and understood by few, and requires a diverse and courageous approach to address.

To accomplish our goal of being an effective partner in the movement to end human trafficking, we have established programs that act across the societal, community, interpersonal, and intrapersonal levels in line with our mission to provide transformative whole-person care for survivors of commercial exploitation as we engage, educate, and mobilize our communities and partners to respond to human trafficking. We need to strengthen and expand these programs.

As we strengthen and expand these programs we will be able to accomplish the following outcomes with increasing effectiveness toward our goal:

1. Our most important strategy, which lies at the heart of Amirah and from which all other strategies begin, is communality. We are committed to fostering environments of belonging and collaboration as we:

• build partnerships from victim identification and service delivery organizations to advocacy-based community group partnerships
• participate in numerous anti-trafficking networks, committees, and task-forces
• convene multiple advisory boards and volunteer groups
• hold awareness raising events and organizational capacity-building trainings
• invite survivors to speak into all the work we do in order to keep their voices at the center of all our programs

Another of our core values, dignity, amplifies our efforts to build community. We are committed to respecting and appreciating each person’s innate value.

2. We have built a comprehensive pipeline of organizational capacity from identification through re-integration including:

• creating and fostering safe spaces and strategic partnerships for victim and survivor identification including, importantly, self-identification
• empowering survivors to break free from their exploitative situations through peer-delivered education about services available to them, how to access those services, and about strategies for breaking free
• delivering healing, restoration, and re-integration services to survivors

3. Where some safe houses are only that, a safe place to stay, Amirah delivers whole-person transformative care that addresses physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, social, and vocational needs of survivors.

4. As survivors stabilize and move toward healing and restoration, Amirah’s programs are designed to foster relationships between the survivors and the community that are mutually meaningful.

Amirah was founded and grown out of a deep commitment from a small group of un-paid people over 5 years. The founding of Amirah was a personal and independent mission, with a single mind toward fighting trafficking, for these founders. This selfless commitment of our founders (many of whom sit on our board) has left an indelible imprint that offers a foundation of trust for the work we do.

We are a community-based organization whose mission and values are designed specifically to fight human trafficking through whole-person care, capacity building, and awareness raising. This focus allows us to fully embrace our core values of excellence (commitment to discovering and achieving the highest standards of excellence possible) and innovative growth (commitment to an intentional, creative, and strategic approach to learning and practice). In addition, our independence empowers us as we mobilize our community to fight trafficking.

Having already been heralded as a national benchmark for human trafficking services in the U.S., and building on the value ingrained by our founders, Amirah has mobilized effective, talented volunteer committees that handle grant writing, community partnerships, event planning, event speakers, outreach, social media, marketing, program support, property maintenance, and administrative support. Many of these volunteers have been with us for multiple years. They have enabled us to have a high capacity at low cost and have been central to our community mobilization achievements.

Among our staff, boards, and volunteers, we have social workers, communications and marketing professionals, public health professionals, doctors, carpenters, lawyers, business leaders, plumbers, non-profit managers, students, teachers, religious leaders, and many more.

Amirah utilizes a number of tools and indicators to measure our progress:

1. Palpable and demonstrative stories/narratives have long been one of the most impactful tools in anti-slavery and anti-trafficking efforts. We capture the stories of the victims and survivors (who want to share them) who have used our services, as well as those of our collaborators. As more stories are captured, we will learn what we are doing well and where we can improve.

2. Output measurements are important tools for understanding and communicating our progress. We continually collect both qualitative and quantitative information about our outputs. Some examples are number of trainings delivered, percentage of program participants who meet their personal goals/graduate the program/attain and keep jobs, number of individuals engaged in awareness events, and number and type of collaborators. Each year we set performance targets for key output indicators.

3. Many of our programs are based on specific theories of change, such as the health belief model. Utilizing such theories allows us to measure the impact over time that our programs are having in a scientific and empirical way utilizing both qualitative and quantitative research methods.

4. Existing tools that have been created, developed, deployed, and validated by those who came before us, largely from the disciplines of social work and public health, serve a useful role in both benchmarking for our programs and measuring our programs. One example is the Casey Life Skills assessment.

5. Numbers of victim and survivor identifications will increase, along with the use of our services as our community engagement expands and deepens.

Starting with less than five people Amirah has grown into a bricks & mortar organization of over 100 people that operates a safe house nad has provided advocacy and training programs. With over 100 partners and collaborators, Amirah has been called a national benchmark program for human trafficking victims by the Homeland Security Victim Assistance Coordinator based in Boston.

Specific examples of our recent achievements are:

• referrals from former program participants
• referrals from partners we have trained on identification (about 20)
• expansion of our services to survivors from the broader New England area, taking referrals from ME, NH, NY, and various parts of MA
• successful service to international and domestic survivors of human trafficking/commercial exploitation
• We serve as the primary location for comprehensive, wrap-around housing services in New England with referrals received via Homeland Security.

These great strides have been made possible by the community that has formed around us, as demonstrated by the large percentage of our programming run by volunteers, donated by supporters, and offered by partners for free or at a discount.

Our programs have supported victims and survivors as they have broken free from their exploitation, all the way through to independent and sustainable living. Our model of transformative, whole-person care works, and it works very well. All program participants have reported achieving some of their goals during their time at Amirah’s safe home.

Our vision is to expand Amirah to several safe homes and supportive communities throughout New England that serve a diversity of human trafficking victim and survivor populations. Now that we know our model works well, we are moving to add capacity to first bring sustainability to our current operations, and second, to resource the strategic expansion of our operations.

Significant barriers remain. Ambassador Luis CdeBaca, Ambassador at Large in charge of the State Department Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, has noted that governments, as well as the public, are stigmatized against confronting human trafficking for fear of having “slave dust” on them – a fear of feeling responsible for such a horrible crime. In addition, the depths of the programs required to aptly address the needs of trafficking victims render traditional value indicators, such as return on investment (ROI), less useful in convincing people to join our cause. Cost per person is fairly high compared to other social services. It is important to point out, however, that Amirah’s actual costs are significantly lower than similar providers due to our supportive community.

Amirah is making steady progress against these challenges. Our unique approach to communality serves to break down barriers to awareness building and value realization because we engage people in a non-threatening and inviting way. This is also where story telling becomes the most important - to hear stories of restoration and community in the words of survivors is among our most potent tools to break down these barriers.