Dear Friends of GSO,
As you all are aware, Global Strategic Operatives to Eradicate Human Trafficking, Inc., officially got started after a high-level meeting at the UN in 2018, sponsored jointly by the Permanent Observer of the Sovereign Order of Malta Mission to the UN and the Permanent Observer Mission to the Holy See.
It was decided to focus on half dozen US sites and half dozen International sites to provide training to healthcare professionals to identify and take appropriate actions when suspicious of someone who may be a potential victim. Secondarily, research would be conducted to compile data on commonalities of policies and protocols established prior to live trainings. Finally, upon completion, a proposed policy will be submitted to the World Health Organization, WHO, to distribute a human trafficking policy for healthcare providers worldwide, which currently does not exist.
I’m pleased to announce in 2019/2020, in just 4 months from November to February, GSO completed Human Trafficking Trainings to five (5) US Healthcare Systems! The integrated delivery network healthcare system sites include: Advocate Aurora Health (IL), Baptist Health (FL), Hackensack Meridian Health (NJ), RWJBarnabas Health (NJ) and Northwell Health (NY). The sixth healthcare site that was scheduled for March 17th, Harris Health/Baylor School of Medicine, had to be canceled due to COVID-19. We are in discussions with them to possibly conduct a virtual training when their staff may be ready to process a human trafficking training.
I’m happy to add, the GSO research team lead by Dr. Cathy Miller has collected preliminary data from the trained US sites ---all indicating very positive results! More data is still being synthesized, but thus far show statistically significant results. This will be significant to prove value to other US healthcare systems to get trained. To that point, I have had several meetings with the Catholic Medical Association, CMA. They are very interested in getting GSO HT trainings into all the Catholic hospital systems throughout the US. This is going to be a huge undertaking to plan and coordinate, which we hope to begin soon.
To that end, I am pleased to announce that GSO has a new Coordinator named Wilonda Green. Wilonda comes from Northwell Health in New York, holds an MBA and was very instrumental in securing Northwell as part of our human trafficking training pilot. Wilonda has great experience in the area of anti-human trafficking and we are very fortunate to have her join us.
Although COVID-19 slowed us down this past spring and summer, we took the time as an opportunity to revise and update all GSO training materials---GSO Human Trafficking (HT) 101 and GSO Human Trafficking (HT) 102A and 102B---to create the best of the best! We’ve updated statistics to reflect accuracy and made it a more uniform, professional look.
Separately, but related, I plan to continue to train to help identify available properties and/or unused buildings that could be renovated and utilized as ‘safe homes’ for victims of human trafficking. Having ‘more beds’ after we teach healthcare professionals to identify and take appropriate action will not only help solve a huge problem, but it also fulfills the continuum.