This winter, E3 Ranch Foundation and Relentless Pursuit Outreach and Recovery are working together to finance and find the next step toward permanent recovery of girls enslaved by sex trafficking: a Crisis Shelter.
Christine’s Place is a success story in its own right, with approximately 20 girls per day coming into the drop-in center, now open five days a week. In its first year of existence, Christine’s Place saw more than 300 different girls for 4,313 visits.
“This will be the most impactful. It’s been the piece that’s always been missing,” Lee Gibson says. “It’ll be a 90-day shelter, and that doesn’t mean she has to stay 90 days. Some won’t need that long, some will. They will each have case workers who can refer and transfer to longer-term care. But the Crisis Shelter has more intent to it — to try and transition them properly. It’s going to be life-changing.”
“We always knew that that would be the real game-changer in all of this, when we get that second place open, to take the girls who are ready — we have places now that we can get them into, but oftentimes girls won’t want to leave the state/area for some other reason — to have a place rolled into the system of Christine’s Place and to be able to take them right into a 60-day or 90-day Crisis Shelter,” Adam says. “For the ones who really want out, this will be the start of the rest of their life and getting them out of that old life. Then we’re talking about real, permanent rescue.”