Cross-Cutting Training and Technical Assistance Opportunities for OVC Anti-Trafficking Grantees

DARYL FOX: Good afternoon everyone and welcome to today's webinar, Cross-Cutting Training and Technical Assistance Opportunities for OVC Anti-Trafficking Grantees, hosted by the Office for Victims of Crime. At this time, it's my pleasure to introduce Lindsay Waldrop, Senior Advisor on Anti-Trafficking Training and Technical Assistance with OVC, to begin the presentation. Lindsay?

LINDSAY WALDROP: Thank you so much, Daryl, and thanks to everyone for joining us today. As Daryl said, my focus at OVC is working on training and technical assistance. And in my duration at OVC, we have always seen technical assistance and working with your technical assistance provider as such a strength. Everyone benefits from enhancing their services, learning about current best practices, sharing models, and building community. So we thank you for working with your TA providers and for joining us today to learn about our specialized--some of our specialized training and technical assistance opportunities. The resources and expertise they have to bear as well. So thank you so much. Next slide, please.

OVC--our OVC human trafficking is divided into two buckets, if you will: program training and technical assistance and specialized training or cross-cutting training and technical assistance. The first bucket is programs. So all of our OVC programs such as direct services, housing, our ECM task forces, have a designated program training and technical assistance provider. You probably hear from them often in terms of setting up meetings, sending you communication, sharing resources with the entire group.

In addition, OVC has specialized training and technical assistance in human trafficking on areas that we find pervasive in ongoing gaps, certain populations or resources, guidance, some sort of publication that needs to be created. So today we’re going to highlight just a few of those. We’re going to highlight training and technical assistance available on economic empowerment and employment opportunities, legal assistance, survivor engagement, labor trafficking. We’ve asked each of them to tell you a little bit about who they are, the TTA available, who it’s available to, and how to access it. And then at the end, I want to quickly just available--some TTA that's available to everyone as a larger OVC grantee. Next slide, please.

We’re just going to highlight a few of our specialized TTA providers today, however, we do have more available. So if you go to our OVC website [ovc.ojp.gov/program/human-trafficking], you can see a full listing as well as project descriptions on each of these, as well as links to some of their sites and resources. And from that, I’m going to kick it over to our first team, the team from Futures Without Violence. Thank you, Carolyne.

CAROLYNE OUYA: Hello everyone. Welcome. It—I’m looking forward to meeting with all of you in the future of your project and supporting you all the best I can with employment opportunities. So a little bit about me. My name is Carolyne Ouya and I’m a Program Manager for a project called Promoting Employment Opportunities for Survivors of Human Trafficking. And as many of you know, safe and sustainable education, employment, and financial opportunities for survivors is critical to the healing journey and the overall wellbeing of survivors of trafficking. And also just to assist with reducing recidivism. I can never say that word right. But really trying to help people get the resources that they need to meet their basic needs and feel secure. Next slide.
And so we support all of you all for free if you contact us by helping you to first just understand what economic empowerment is and what those key components are for a strong economic empowerment program. 

We help build capacity of your staff and any partners or collaborations that you all are a part of on how you can build education and employment opportunities for survivors in your community. And we also help you to create curriculums or if you're looking to launch an economic empowerment program or you're having challenges with finding safe and sustainable employment opportunities for the people in your community, then you can reach out with--to us and we will help you research what's available, identify who those key partners are, whether they're employers or the education system or Department of Labor Resources, and just support your survivors in your community in having access to those financial education, employment opportunities that will be sustainable over time. I'm going to put a couple of links into the chat box where you can gather more information around economic empowerment on how to reach us and we look forward to working with you all. Next slide.

I mentioned a lot of this, but just to reiterate, we are free. We--our process is usually to just get to know you all, to learn more about what kind of environment you're in, what the challenges that you're experiencing around access to education and employment opportunities, and then connecting to resources that are available. So yeah, that's a little bit about us. Next slide.
And I've put a lot of these links into the chat box for you all to be able to reach out to us. Next slide.

And I know that was a--the quick rendition, but we look forward to more conversation and I'll go ahead and introduce Erika Gonzalez with CAST.

ERIKA GONZALEZ: Hi everyone. It's nice to meet you. My name is Erika Gonzalez and I'm a Training and Technical Assistance Managing Attorney at CAST. I have one other teammate. Her name is Carson Osberg and she's not here today, but--so I'll just give you a high-level overview about what our program is. If you want to move over to the next slide?

We have had our training and technical assistance program since 2015. And really the goal of our project is supporting service providers, assisting them with legal remedies that survivors of trafficking are going through. We cover all sorts of legal topics, but are best known for our T visa work is probably where, if you've heard of our TTA, that's probably where you heard of it from. What's new for our new funding this year is that we've subgranted Freedom Network USA's Survivor Reentry Project to help us handle post-conviction relief issues as they relate to trafficking survivors. That's actually technically not new as we did subgrant them a little bit in our last funding cycle. But what's new this time is we're subgranting NCVLI [National Crime Victim Law Institute] to help us provide technical assistance on victim rights enforcement as it pertains to working with survivors. With both of these subgrantees, we're super-excited to expand a little bit more of our expertise in these areas. And we will be creating joint trainings with them, specifically targeted at our most popular audience, which tends to be immigration attorneys. Next slide.

So the way that we do our project is three essential main components. We have individualized technical assistance, which I'm going to talk about more, but this is essentially when individual practitioners send us specific questions to help them navigate case strategy or just things that are going on with their client that intersect with the legal field. We also have weekly calls for attorneys where they can ask less-intensive questions than you may--you might do through a request form, and I'll talk about that more in a second. We have a ton of resources for providers to reference. Many are on nuanced topic that do require like a more thorough explanation, and we've also created some toolkits with video explainers on that. And then we also have our training component, which includes on-demand trainings that are always available to anyone. Our live trainings however, are more intensive with a focus on utilizing adult learning principles to implement more practice during our live sessions. So, we've gone from having larger trainings to having smaller trainings that are more practice-intensive focused. So that's been a new development in the progress of having this grant now since 2015. Next slide.

So just drilling down a little bit, and I will put these links [https://casttta.nationbuilder.com/individual_ta] after I'm done presenting in the chat box for folks--oh, thanks, Daryl. This is our individual technical assistance form where you can ask us for any help. And like other OVC projects, our technical assistance is a hundred percent free. So anyone can ask us for assistance, and including if you're working with legal pro bonos who need assistance navigating these cases, feel free to pass on the request form.

Our individual technical assistance, what I've learned is not that many people know about how we do this specifically. We have a couple of forms of technical assistance. One of them is case consultations. This is really specific for troubleshooting and strategizing specific cases. And in these consultations, CAST, we provide recommendations on case strategies specifically tailored to that individual request. We'll do a lot of research. We only do this via email. We actually no longer do phone consults. I'll talk about how we talk--do phone conversations in a second. But the reason we do more email is for these case consultations to provide citations, links through resources, and make sure you have everything you need to navigate your case.

We also do general information requests, which aren't specific to a particular case but involve questions about trends or how things are--how general processes tend to work. And then one thing that we really pride ourselves on is our document review requests we do for T visa sets, specifically on requests for evidence, denials, or appeals where we thoroughly review the documents that you've sent, including the immigration's response to your additional--initial application so that we could provide a very thorough case example—or case strategy for you. And also we do review non-immigration documents like post-conviction relief applicant statements or victim compensation documents. So that one is definitely a more intensive kind of technical assistance, but it’s also part of our services.

And I said we don't do phone consultations, and we don't do them on an individual basis, but we do them on a weekly basis with attorneys or legal practitioners to collaborate and answer questions that are less intensive in a round-robin type of fashion to just kind of brainstorm as a community and just talk about more high-level things. Next slide.

So finally, I just wanted to highlight for you all our resources. And Daryl has put in the chat box for you the--our TTA website [https://casttta.nationbuilder.com], which isn't quite connected to the CAST's main website, but it's separate. And this is where we have everything linked up for you. I want to first talk about our on-demand trainings. We have sixteen courses available for free on on-demand; thirteen of those are for legal providers and three are for social service providers. For social service providers, they do cover, you know, the legal definition of trafficking, privilege and confidentiality, and intake practices. So we do try to create material for social service providers on the intersections of their profession with the legal field and then how the survivor might be navigating legal issues.

We also have two larger self-paced courses, one of them is an anti-trafficking lawyering module for attorneys which really focuses on introductory topics on working with this population, including understanding what human trafficking is and trauma-informed introductions. The other one is for social service providers to kind of think through legal issues spawning for their client as part of their intake processes.

In terms of live workshops, right now we have three recurring trainings that are very practical-focused. The first one is the Ends-Means-Process workshop where we work with legal practitioners who are taking on these cases to solely practice how to do analysis of what it means to make the legal determination that someone is a victim of severe form of trafficking of persons. And then we have a Declaration workshop which is an intensive workshop that is peer review-based so people can learn how to write their initial T visa decoration--declarations for T visas moving forward. And lastly, we have our anti-trafficking lawyering module too which is an intensive course on how to approach T visas from a practical but trauma-informed and race-conscious way.

You’ll also have access to our TTA website, as I said, Daryl put that in our--in the chat box for you. Here, we have blogs with updates on certain issues like notes for engagements with immigration or other federal partners. You have an FAQ on T visas, we have several toolkits including how to report trafficking for T visa purposes, how to do trafficking analysis, and all other types of advisories. We also have a couple of databases including--for the attorneys, I really like this one, our Administrative Appeals Office case table which takes all of the T visa-appealed cases and puts them in one location. We have a database of all of our advisories and trauma-informed legal resources.

Before I close out, I just want to give a preview of what's coming in this new funding is--or--and a couple of changes. We did have social service office hours. Our Senior Social Worker has gone to spread her wings. So we have a brief hiatus on that and we're looking on how we can change that moving forward. But in terms of the good news we have for this year, is we did update one of our most popular advisories which is the human trafficking definition advisory, which includes a lot of stuff, definitions that are included in the legal definition in severe form of trafficking. Honestly, it’s really nerdy but anyone can take a look at it. I’ll put that in the chat box in a second. We also have plans to release some training on the Debt Bondage Relief Act which was the new Credit Repair Act for survivors of trafficking. We already have a guide in English and Spanish that can be for anybody to use, service providers and survivors if they need to do this on their own. And finally, we are anticipating the release of the new T visa regulations this year, so we foresee a lot of updates to all of our materials based on that. And I think that’s everything I have. So next slide, and Suleman, we are turning it over to you.

SULEMAN MASOOD: Thank you, Erika. Hello, everyone. My name is Suleman Masood and I serve as the project lead for the Survivor Engagement Training and Technical Assistance project, also known as SETTA. Next slide, please.

In partnership with both the National Survivor Network [NSN] and Survivor Alliance, SETTA is an exciting opportunity that’s open to you all, OVC human trafficking program grantees, that are interested in increasing survivor engagement, and forming new partnerships with lived experience experts within your communities. The intended goals for the survivor engagement for our project are essentially to increase collaboration between the work that you do and enhance victim identification, referrals and assistance service delivery, finding ways to build partnerships within your communities, as well as those survivor leaders in your area. Additionally, we want to find ways to support grantees in intentional and sustainable engagement with survivors to improve anti-trafficking programming. This survivor-led TTA support is designed to provide OVC’s human trafficking grantees with individualized intensive training and technical assistance. Again, dedicated to develop a survivor engagement plan that can be implemented into your existing programming. I'll also share that we are th—-probably the newest TTA provider here as we launched February of last year.

Increasing survivor engagement requires our ability to both learn but more importantly, find ways to unlearn. This is essentially how we create tailored TTA for our grantees. It's finding ways to engage and understand how engagement may have occurred in the past with survivors. Both the NSN and Survivor Alliance have an ongoing role in the co-creation and collaborative model that the SETTA project team and partners have developed. And as you see in this chart here, we rely heavily on the National Survivor Network and GFEMS [Global Fund to End Modern Slavery] toolkit, Meaningful Engagement of People with Lived Experiences. This is how we help to work with grantees for them to understand their level of engagement with survivors in their communities.

Power imbalances, I will say, is really the crux of when you look at the inform stage, the ask stage, the involve stage, collaborate, and empower stage. We're finding ways to work with grantees, to understand what power imbalances may look like, and again, understanding what the traditional relationship between somebody who has lived experience and the service provider looks like, and finding ways to innovate their engagement. Next slide, please.

So how do we create engagement? So while we work with grantees to create engagement, we work to first establish a foundation with the agency. The survivor engagement should not be thought of as something that’s just additional to what they're already doing, right? That could be their programmatic or strategic goals that they may have set up for the year. Instead, we want to help the grantees to instead evaluate how their services and relationships function and find ways to develop strategies related to professional development and skill-building, as an example, that can help equip internal staff, and when I say staff, that can also include, you know, if you have consulting opportunities, if you have volunteering opportunities, if you're working with your executives or your executive managers, and finding ways to build partnerships and think about how your organization currently has partnerships with those with lived experience.

What you're looking at here in this graphic is an example of how we connect grantees to lived experience experts. This is called our SETTA consultant map. For many years, we have heard of agencies finding difficulty in finding ways to collaborate with survivors in their community, their state, or their region. So, in a response to that, we created an interactive map that's intended to show the types of consultants that are available to support the SETTA project. The map is intended to show each of the available consultant's top skillsets, locations, and whether they're affiliated with either the NSN, Survivor Alliance, or both. Really, the overall takeaway I want you all to have when you look at this graphic is that in order for survivor engagement to truly thrive, we have to find ways to move past our traditional thinking that the only way to engage with somebody with lived experience is through their trauma narrative. Next slide, please.

As I mentioned, we launched last year, so I just want to share kind of a bit of a progress part on where we're at. Between July to December of last year, we worked alongside our partners to launch and complete five training and technical assistance projects, currently wit--now with seven in progress. The examples of the type of TTA have included are ways to work with grantees to increase accessibility by providing a culturally responsive or appropriate outreach, develop internal organizational policy on ways to receive or provide feedback from your clients, right? That may be former clients that you have, that may be current clients you currently have in your plan. And then finally, we've worked with grantees also to develop policies on professional development and ways to best support clients who may be at risk of trafficking, so really navigating safe spaces. Next slide, please.

I just want to briefly close and just talk about some upcoming events that I think would be worth your time to check out. We have a Community of Practice Webinar, we tend to host this quarterly. This month, we're having a topic on how to implement effective practices in hiring and onboarding. The common question you get is, "Well, I want to b--I want to work to find ways to create more inclusive or a diverse space. I want to be able to have more diversity of thought and hire somebody with lived experience" you know. We had a previous session back in December that talked about, like, what that looks like and we worked--kind of had an open discussion with grantees on how they navigate through that. So we're hoping to use this month's webinar to talk more on recommendations that we have and considerations to have when you're working to create job postings, when you're looking to hire, and also onboard persons with lived experience. So how do you find ways to utilize survivor engagement when it comes to the hiring process.

The next thing I'll talk about is, we have our Food for Thought Sessions. Think of this as more of an elevated office hour session. It's an opportunity for us to hold conversations with grantees on several topics related to survivor engagement. We hold these the fourth Tuesday of the month, so our next session is scheduled for February 27th at 2:00 p.m. If you have any questions on our TA application form, you have a link to the application form here, and I know that's going to be available to you after this conversation. And as well as if you have any specific questions for us or you want to get more information on that consultant map I shared, please feel free to contact us here at [email protected]. And with that, I will now turn it over to my colleagues, Charlee Borg and Florencia, who represent on Framework. Thank you.

CHARLEE BORG: Thanks so much, Suleman. Always great to see you. Hello, my name is Charlee Borg. I am the Deputy Director of Framework, which we'll be talking about. I am coming from a background of service delivery in crisis management, in long-term therapy and client care, managing hotlines, direct service departments, housing departments, working as a training and technical assistant provider for the United States Committee for Refugees and Immigrants and through OVC for the last five years, so I'm very happy to be here, very happy to be continuing my work with Framework, and I will hand it over to Florencia to introduce herself.

FLORENCIA DOMINGUEZ: Hi, everyone. Thank you for the opportunity to be here. I'm excited to be a part of--to be part of Framework right now, a part of this project as a technical advisor. Before, I was a project manager overseeing some of OVC trafficking grants in the Miami, Florida offices. And extremely--again, extremely happy to be here with all of you and I look forward to continue to engage with all of you in this cycle.

CHARLEE BORG: Thanks, Florencia. All right. Let's move to the first slide. What is Framework? Framework at its core is a survivor-informed and trauma-informed anti-trafficking training and technical assistance program dedicated, really, to providing you all with the tools to combat all forms of human trafficking, including labor trafficking, which is our primary focus. This is incredibly important to me as a survivor of child sex and labor trafficking. And the fact that over 70 of you are on the call today to continue in your mission to serve survivors or to join us in connecting with labor trafficking survivors for the first time, I just want to commend you and thank you for your work and let you know how much I appreciate us all being together here today.

What we do at Framework is intended to increase collaboration of labor trafficking professionals, like yourselves, and the professionals that you serve. We're aware that you're probably already doing fantastic work connecting with other professionals within your region, and we're here to help with that as well. We are looking to improve service delivery to labor trafficking survivors and enhance anti-trafficking programs by supporting intentional and sustainable survivor engagement. We want survivors to be connected with you through consultant opportunities, but also we want to be curious on why, you know, sex trafficking but also labor trafficking survivors are not maybe employed within your organization. Framework has the ability to connect with you, go through your policies, hiring rubrics, outreach campaigns, case studies of clients, all of the above to enhance your ability to serve trafficking survivors. Let's go to the next slide and talk a little bit about the resources.

So Framework, within its current iteration, is new. We took a short hiatus, which allowed for some fun things on my part. I was able to consult with UN in Poland and Switzerland to help support outreach campaigns for Ukrainian refugees, able to consult with some of my sibling TA providers. Thanks for providing me some consultant work in this last year. And otherwise, from the last iteration, I was honored to be a part of that development and implementation as well.

So I've been with Framework on and off since 2020. And we have already established a wide array of resources for you. These resources include things like case study practice videos, where you can follow professionals, follow survivors, understand what the survivors are thinking and feeling during intake processes, where anxiety or disconnection might occur and how you can repair that rupture when possible. We offer answers to these case study practice videos. We'll be going through one together today. We also provide webinars, screenings tailored specifically for your organization in a private fashion or through online public events. 

We have individuals writing blog posts that are professionals working within the field, but predominantly survivors. Now, that it is Black History Month, you can access our resources through frameworkTA.org and check out blog posts about Black History Month written by survivor, Moninda Marube. We can share tip sheets, survivor-created resources. We actually have two resource libraries on frameworkTA.org. One being, in general, all resources created by a wide array of professionals like yourselves and then a survivor-created resource area. So that includes things like tip sheets in employment and trauma-informed engagement through consultancy or long-term employment through client services. And we also provide things like our survivor soundbites. What the intention of that is is we know that not everyone has funding to hire individuals with lived experience so that they can share their expertise or provide consultation on endeavors. 

Visit our resource library. Check out if there's any soundbites that you can use in your regional trainings that might enhance your training and provide that survivor voice.

We also have online eLearning certificate courses. Two, one of which is focused on things like the basics of labor trafficking, how our economic systems, our culture within the United States, racism, xenophobia, create for an environment that allows for exploitation, how our history within the United States has been very rooted and economically focused on taking advantage of individuals from different backgrounds. We talk about things like residential schools and the federal labor trafficking of indigenous youth up until the '70s. Check out our Foundations to Combat Labor Trafficking eLearning. Get that certificate. 

There are seven modules. Each take about 10 to 20 minutes. You don't even have to take them in order. Follow what's interesting to you. You can follow survivors within their own experiences. Click and help them make decisions and see what their pathway leads to. Again, practice your own skills and build that confidence. 

And in the future, we're hoping to provide office hours, starting in March, mentorship opportunities where you--your organization can continue in its growth in whichever way is important through the mentorship of an organization that might have already been successful in that area, and a community of learning, where we can bring providers across the country together to connect with one another and really build in our thought leadership.

Over the--let's switch to the next slide. Over the last couple years, we have had the honor of connecting with over 1,500 people through our public events specifically. One-third of which those individuals attended multiple events. So that's something that is an area of pride for ourselves at Framework. And being a nonprofit TA provider, we got to toot our own horn a little bit here. So here are some examples of the things that people are saying. All right. Next slide.

And within our engagement, the individuals that collaborated with Framework across 2019 to 2021, we saw an increase in comfort, in confidence screening, identifying and serving labor trafficking survivors. So starting off with the teal of individuals in 2019 and then building that confidence to 47% of our providers feeling entirely confident in identifying labor trafficking in 2021. All right. That's the end of my spiel, so I'm going to hand it over to Florencia.

FLORENCIA DOMINGUEZ: Thank you, Charlee. And, yes, we wanted to--we don't have a lot of time, but we wanted to do like a mini exercise of--not only to engage for a little bit, but also as an example of the type of support--technical support we can provide when creating tools or developing practices with a focus on labor--always with a focus on labor trafficking. So while we watch this mini video for the audience, something to watch and consider. These are some of the questions that you can consider, again, while watching the video. What are the clues Anna's experience might be labor trafficking? What were some of the barriers to Anna's self-identification? What were the examples of force, fraud, or coercion? How could you create outreach that help survivors see and report their own experiences? And, Daryl, if you don't mind, can we play the mini video? And feel free to put answers in the chat as we go over the comments.

DARYL FOX: Actually, I don't believe that's part of this deck, Florencia. I don't have that.

CHARLEE BORG: Go to the next slide.

DARYL FOX: Oh.

CHARLEE BORG: Oh. I wonder--I am curious if what happened is when maybe you took out animations, maybe it took out all of the areas technically playing a--[VIDEO CUTS OUT] hi, everyone. Technical difficulties. Technically playing a video appears on an animation pane the same way. Not a problem at all. I made this video. Let's talk about it a little bit. Within this video, which will be shared in the chat, if someone can throw that in, we follow a survivor who is being trafficked within a factory setting. They pass a billboard of a White woman chained and it says, "Human trafficking happens here." 

The individual thinks how scary, how scary human trafficking must be. They pass more outreach. Something that says, something along the lines of--the experiences that labor trafficking survivors go through. And they wonder to themselves, "What does force even mean? I wish that I could leave my job situation but I know what happened to the last person that tried." Finally, we reach an outreach that speaks to the individual and empowers them to self-identify and connect with the resources that are going to be deemed as helpful because it can support them within their wage theft, within their exploitation. It speaks to the needs of the individual specifically. So an example of what will happen when you go to frameworkTA.org is that you'll watch a video, consider the questions, and then the answers will be in the description of the video.

DARYL FOX: Charlee, I have that queued up. I could share that right now, if you have time for that. If you want to.

CHARLEE BORG: Sure. We're the last ones so I figured we could go a little over.

DARYL FOX: Yeah. Great. It's a great video. I'll go ahead and share that. One moment.

FLORENCIA DOMINGUEZ: Thank you.

[PLAYS VIDEO]

FLORENCIA DOMINGUEZ: Thank you. And, yes, it is a--thank you. Thank you. It is a great video. And then we post some questions, and that's why we wanted to show it to you as a mini summary of some of the things that we can create in collaborating or can help others with the outreach, specifically when we're talking about trafficking as we know. So self-identification is really, really hard. And here are some of the--we're doing this exercise previously when we had more time. These are some of the answers to things we have pointed out, like what are the clues Anna's experience might be labor trafficking? 

Working more hours and days than is legal, illegal deductions, rumors of bad things, mentions of owing debt. What were some of the barriers to Anna's self-identification? Representations of excessive force. Like the usual misconceptions that we may have on labor trafficking. And this is why these conversations are so important, but we have seen in our experience in working with--in anti-labor trafficking is that not only--we--definitely, we need to pay attention specifically to labor trafficking when we are talking about anti-trafficking in general. 

We have noticed--for example, legal providers sometimes are the main source of referrals because of the issue with self-identification, workers may go--foreign-born individuals, their work may go through a legal service provider and through--the intake is the attorney who recognizes that there are clues for anti-trafficking. So we are trying to create very mindful outreach that is not only for us, the community, but also to our partners, the people that we work with, and also the individuals that we want to provide, the vulnerable communities that can be engaged in trafficking. Thank you so much for playing the video and troubleshooting this. I'll pass it along, next slide please, to Charlee.

CHARLEE BORG: What's a tech event without some technical difficulties, right?

FLORENCIA DOMINGUEZ: Right.

CHARLEE BORG: All right. You've heard it before, frameworkTA.org. Apply for our mentorship program. Apply to be a consultant. Request technical assistance for your organization or your region. Sign up for our newsletter. And let's go to the next slide.

Speaking of our newsletter, please take the time to fill out this survey. You can sign up for our listserv if you're interested. You can say no if you are not. And, otherwise, if you are already serving labor trafficking survivors, we'd love to know what identification questions you're using at your organization. So, real quick, probably 30-second survey, if you have the time. And with that, thank you so much. And I'll hand it over to Lindsay.

LINDSAY WALDROP: Thank you so much. And thank you to everybody today. For our participants, I just--oh, I haven't taken myself off video. [TURNS ON VIDEO] For our participants, I just want to underscore that today we're featuring some of our human trafficking specialized training and technical assistance. These are tailored for specific needs in our human trafficking field. And, again, we want to thank you for taking time and learning more about these resources and, hopefully, for pursuing them. We've put them--put them aside. We have experts making them available and connecting you to all these fantastic resources, so we hope you pursue them.

We also want to know--want you to know that being an OVC grantee, as a whole, taking off your trafficking hat, there's also other resources available to you, specifically--thank you. Through our OVC Training and Technical Assistance Center, so OVC TTAC. I encourage you to please go to the website [www.ovcttac.gov] and see the different ways that they might support you in your work, through different opportunities such as professional development, job aids, materials, assistance with consultants and subject matter experts, et cetera. I didn't want to take too much time on this today, but I really, really encourage you to go to the website and see just a wealth of material that has been built on crime victimization and, again, available ways to support you and your work over many years. And so know that--next slide.

Oh, that's it for me. But know that our--if you want to know more about any of these resources, please reach out to your grant monitor or to your program TTA provider as well. So they're meant to support your program and help you connect to other OVC-specialized TTA or broader OVC TTA. So please dig around the website, find that information, or, again, connect to one of us, who can help you sort of navigate all of that. So thank you for your time today. But please put in some questions. If there are questions specific for one of our TTA providers and their program, that's great. Any questions you have about OVC trafficking TTA as a whole, we'll take them and send them to the appropriate panelist.

So I'm going to ask everyone, if we can just maybe do a quick round robin. We have a question on eligibility limits. Can you just maybe do--quickly, maybe starting in the flow of order from today. Are there limits on who--the types of OVC grantees that can--sort of who--of the OVC grantee's eligibility limits? And does that include sub-award partners? Can they also receive TTA through your services? Can we start with Carolyne?

CAROLYNE OUYA: Yes. So in terms of eligibility for TTA, we are open to supporting all OVC-funded organizations who are serving survivors of trafficking. We also kind of expand beyond that to just like any organization who's supporting a survivor of trafficking and looking to provide them with education, employment opportunities. And then in terms of project partners, sub-award organizations, yes. I mean, bring them with you. Our approach is very much based on collaboration and figuring out how to create a strong ecosystem of economic and education opportunities for survivors. So please feel free to bring any program partners or sub-award organizations to dive into the conversations of what's available in your community.

ERIKA GONZALEZ: There is no limitation in the same way for--or for us in our grant. We are just working with folks who are assisting on legal remedies for survivors of trafficking, what--and whatever that might look like, right? So a lot of survivors who are having access to attorneys, get their attorneys through non-nonprofit organizations, right, or are referred out to pro bono. So, really, our materials are for anybody who has questions about legal remedies for survivors of trafficking. I will say that in like high demand trainings, because our trainings are pretty small at this point, we do prioritize OVC grantees. And although they tend to go higher on our priority list, but all of our materials is always affordable to anyone. The only folks we don't provide direct technical assistance to is to survivors of trafficking because they need to seek legal representation to do that and that gets complicated being a legal TTA provider. So that's the only limitation on our grant. Suleman?

SULEMAN MASOOD: Yeah. Similar. I think for our focus, we're only open to those with an active OVC human trafficking grant. But that could be anyone working in housing, medical or legal services, statewide-focused initiatives, or an enhanced collaborative model. As far as resources go, yes, that can be shared, but as far as the specific training and technical assistance, we--our limitation is with those with an active grant. Charlee and Florencia?

CHARLEE BORG: I don't have anything to add.

LINDSAY WALDROP: Thank you, Charlee. I have another question for you guys. I have a question about when--say somebody is looking for a speaker on a specific topic, and I'm going to toss it to you, but this really could go for any of our specialized TTA providers. "So let's say a grantee is looking for a national speaker on labor trafficking to present, how would they find those type of resources?" And, again, I can send this question to anyone. I'm going to start with our IRC Framework Team, but, you know, should they go to you for sort of a subject matter expertise or resource? Should they go to their program specialist? How do they navigate that?

CHARLEE BORG: Yeah. I think--you know, one thing is the more resources in your tool belt, I think the more advantage that you have. I think of gardening. You know, you need a wide variety. And even if we have expertise in the same area, we might have a different perspective. We might have different tools that we can offer you. So I would say that you should always feel comfortable reaching out to everything available to you.

FLORENCIA DOMINGUEZ: I agree. And, again, it is all the different perspective and nobody can know it all. So sometimes gathering those different ideas of different expertise may help you come to your own conclusions on what works best for your particular situation or location culturally-wise. So I wasn't very available, but, yes, don't leave it to one resource. That's what I'll suggest.

LINDSAY WALDROP: Thank you so much. And, again, I would echo that. I would just say that there are many resources available, and I hope you walk away recognizing that we're really here to wrap around and support you. You have these program TTA providers specialized for your program. You have folks who are specialized on a certain topic or a certain area, and it is okay to utilize all of them because we've put these resources available to you. And we can find ways to sort of make that work in a way that helps to really enhance your programs, especially if you're looking in these specialized areas. So thank you so much.

Let's see. We have a few more questions, I believe. We have, again, a follow-up question just for Futures. Just a very quick clarification. "Are your services only for OVC grantees or can others, sort of at large, receive those services?"

CAROLYNE OUYA: Oops. Sorry. I lost my control for a second. No. They do not have to be OVC-funded organizations. They can be anyone who is interested in receiving support on providing employment and education opportunities for survivors of trafficking.

LINDSAY WALDROP: Thank you, guys. I don't see any final questions. So if anyone would like to leave us with any final thoughts or words. If not, I'll end it early. All right. Well, please know we've made a few plugs. We've let you know there's plenty of resources out there. We're here to support you in lots of ways. Thank you so much to our panelists today and for just taking the time to really show off your work, and, hopefully, others will follow up and connect with you and make those connections. So thank you so much.

DARYL FOX: On behalf of the Office for Victims of Crime and our panelists, we want to thank you for joining today's webinar. This will end today's presentation.