Brag Post: Saving Innocence Team
While many of you know about the organization as a whole, we wanted to let you know more about our team, and how we do it. This team is incredible, and I am often amazed at their resilience and adaptability to frequently changing circumstances. They are dedicated and motivated to give their clients their best, even at 4am!
Our case managers are all amazing women who have concern and care for the survivors that one cannot duplicate. As a clinical supervisor, I will often help the staff debrief and allow each case manager to process some of the secondary or vicarious trauma that comes out of hearing about the situations that the survivors have experienced. A great strength of our team is that we all support one another, because we all understand together that this is a unique niche and that it is a great privilege to have the opportunity to speak into survivor’s lives and circumstances. In our group supervision, we are able to speak more about the victories and struggles with each of our clients, and discuss different ways to approach the particular dilemmas, pulling each from our clinical expertise, as well as experiences of what we have tried and what has worked. We receive training from professionals monthly to make sure we are on top of the best practices, and we make sure that we are visiting our clients weekly or biweekly depending on the program they are in.
There are many difficult situations in this work, and more often when we are dealing with crisis. For example, it may all catch up to us emotionally on our way home from a police station where we may have just met with multiple survivors who have experienced horrendous things. We have to quickly process some of life’s great mysteries such as “how can people be so ruthless?” or “how did these kids survive?” There are no easy answers, but it is often a reminder why we do this work, and why we need more support from volunteers and partners who understand this difficult and complicated issue.
One of the key elements to doing this work of supporting survivors is our own self-care. We know that we are not as helpful as we could be if we are not ourselves healthy. We put measures in place to make sure we are taking good care of ourselves, and in each group supervision session, we review the ways we are implementing our own self-care plans.
Through it all, it is key to have a cohesive team that can be kind to each other on difficult days, and to work together on both the micro and macro levels to work on the prevention front as well as restoration. We do the best we can with what we have every day, and we hope you will continue to support us in the fight against human trafficking! If you would like to support the team in any way, we would love the help and support!
