You can’t sign up, to say, go on a raid, very easily,” says Schmidt. “And the fact that this kind of stuff was happening, just really grabbed my wife and I.” “Human trafficking is a difficult subject to go volunteer in. He'd heard about human trafficking and found it appalling.īut the question was, how could he help stop it? In 2011, after he had sold Canvas On Demand, he and his wife were looking for a way to make a bigger difference, beyond just business.
Schmidt is a successful entrepreneur who founded and sold several companies, including, which took photos and printed them on canvas to look like oil paintings. The fact that the over-arching issue is fighting modern-day slavery is a bonus to the people who have gotten involved.” Folks have been exciting about buying a van, to help these girls get to school in Cambodia. “The school is focused on empowering female leaders,” says Joseph Schmidt, founder of EndCrowd. So they try to cover the distance with rickshaws. The girls from the villages who’ve been walking to school have had incidents, and the families have gotten scared of the girls making the walk. The Cambodia-based AIM, dedicated to rescuing and rehabilitating victims of child trafficking in the southeast Asian nation, was featured in the award-winning CNN Freedom Project documentary ' Every Day in Cambodia.’ Now there's a way to help from anywhere in the world. "Parents don’t want their children walking to school because the roads are dangerous and kids are propositioned on the way to school." operations at Agape International Missions (AIM). Some children have dropped out because they lack transportation," says Julie Harrold, director of U.S.
“We have over 350 children in our school from different areas of the community. In the global fight to end human trafficking, they are probably not the first weapons that come to mind.īut on the ground in places like Cambodia and India, anti-trafficking advocates say these are tools are at the top of their wish lists.