From Hailey Virusso, Preble Street Director of Anti-Trafficking Services:

Closing out a federal grant is both a tumultuous and grounding experience. In the flurry of contingency planning, documentation, and endings are also the stories of resilience, of healing, of love.

At Preble Street, love is the difference – love for the journey, love during pain, love at the end. In three years, our Anti-Trafficking program has borne witness to great love: families reunited locally and across borders, college degrees attained, survivors signing their first leases, and most importantly, the feeling of safety within their body and heart.

Every day we stand alongside survivors as they fall in love with themselves, with their strength, their grit, their unnecessary resilience. We believe in the power of love, and the doors love can open. We believe in the power of community and how communities can rise together and thrive. We believe in the power of collective action, our voices demanding change to end this form of structural violence. This day is sad, but it does not mean our work is over – it means that we need to endure this moment of duress to be sure that we answer the call of the next survivor seeking to leave, seeking to make change, seeking to be heard.  

Much like survivors, who have survived before our program and will survive after us – our program will survive this but we believe in much more than surviving. Maine’s commitment to supporting survivors of trafficking must be prioritized and we will not stop advocating for solutions that keep all of our community members safe.