HISTORY OF THE MOVEMENT
SRI LANKA
DISCOVERING THE PROBLEM OF TRAFFICKING
The Hundred Movement was born out of a vision to rescue and restore one hundred women and children from the U.S. sex trade.
“Within an hour and and a half I handed over the keys to my house.”
From 2005 to 2007 our founder PW Gopal was working on a documentary in Sri Lanka outlining the plight of an orphanage that had been hit by the tsunami. On the third year of this mission one of the orphan girls was sold into slavery and taken to India. Without hope for her recovery, PW began to study human trafficking when he returned stateside and eventually leased out his beautiful Victorian home in Columbus, OH to a non-profit that was housing victims.
One Church for One Life
Ignited by passion and struck by the similar number of trafficking victims and churches in the U.S. (350,000+ each), he began to build a 20-year project that would answer the fundamental question:
“Is the Church a viable solution for victim aftercare?”
In other words, if trafficking is the lock we're trying to open, is the church the key?
COLUMBUS
TACKLING THE PROBLEM OF SUSTAINABILITY
Foster Care over Group Homes
After spending over four years looking at the group home models for aftercare, PW realized that the startup cost and failure rate made it almost completely impossible to replicate success. Homes were opening and closing in six months and the ones that stayed open were unable to recommend stable practices to him. Foster care was his hope from the beginning but the initial conversation in the counter trafficking industry revolved around group homes so he followed suit and kept his attention there. With the list of deficits piling up, he felt free to move his focus to foster care. For the past few years, he and Amanda (his wife and our board chair and specialist in clinical development) have been focused on models available to them and which, if any, could be altered to suit the needs of a trafficking victim.
After the Gopals moved to Asheville, NC, Amanda spent a good deal of time with a local foster care agency that directed her to look into IAFT (Intensive Alternative Family Treatment) which is a step above Therapeutic Foster Care in the state of North Carolina and could provide the proper basis of training for the families the Movement wants to build. With a licensed IAFT family in place, the Movement would be able to provide an additional 20 hours of training in trauma classes and another 10 hours on infrastructure and sustainability practices.
ASHEVILLE
BUILDING THE MODEL OF AFTERCARE
The "20-Person Family" — An Acts 2 Vision
“We start with one: one licensed IAFT nuclear family here in Asheville with an extended family of 20 trauma informed family members supporting them.”
The Hundred Movement chose to build this model around the example of the Acts 2 church—a community of followers of Jesus committed to Him and the ideas written in Acts 2. The premise is that if a family can truly represent this model of eating together, praying together, worshiping together and sharing communion together it would be ideally suited for a victim to heal. The Acts 2 church was committed to the work of God in close quarters with their community, and community is what a victim of trafficking needs. Food, shelter, and safety are obvious provisions of a therapeutic system but so is “family"—grandparents, aunts, uncles and young adults all living in proximity and committed to seeing each other grow in life and faith.
To the Hundred and Beyond
In 2016 a Board of Directors was put in place, and the Hundred Movement achieved official non-profit status. Now the Movement is fundraising and waiting on the first placement. Once a little girl is placed with Family #1 a few years will be spent gathering information on HOW to gather information and better study the health and progress of a child in this specific model. The first three families will enter into a learning collaborative where they will be fixed with the burden of helping to verify a model as well as providing time and space for their child to recover and grow.
This process will continue through Family #10 until what can be called a “best practice model” is attained—the rough edges will have been ironed out and the majority of pieces put in place for the other 90 families to come in and help care for victims and fine-tune the model.
“The goal is by year 2028 to have 100 families caring for 100 or more victims, leading the way for the other 350,000 churches in the U.S. to foster victims of the sex trade.”