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MISSION

To develop, equip, and empower a community of survivors of human trafficking engaging in advocacy, education, peer-to-peer mentorship, prevention, and policy work using a public health framework and human rights approach.

About the National Survivor Network (NSN)

The National Survivor Network (NSN) is a values-based, survivor-led professional membership community for survivors of human trafficking who are engaged in or preparing for leadership in the many movements to end violence, whether as professionals, activists, or community organizers.

Our leadership is made up of a full-time manager, a steering group, and working group co-facilitators. Working group co-facilitators serve 12-24 month staggered terms and can rotate through leadership on different working groups throughout their time in the NSN. The Learning and Training Working Group (LTWG) develops our skill sessions calendar and supports our training and educational programming. The Membership and Community Working Group (MCWG) oversees new applicant interviewing and onboarding and supports conflict resolution within the network. Current MCWG co-facilitators also serve on our Steering Group alongside its other members. The Steering Group’s primary task is providing guidance on major NSN decisions that impact members, as well as revising, clarifying, and creating foundational practices and documents that align with our non-carceral values. This includes our Expectations for How We Show Up (formerly “Code of Conduct”), safeguarding practices, grievance procedures, and disability justice framework.

We have been rolling out new working groups every 6 months or so, and hope to roll out additional ones soon. It is our vision that within 5 years we will have a poll of 12-20 members who have served on all working groups and are intimately familiar with the core functions of the network. This is in alignment with our grassroots, community-organizing lens: While we are a nonprofit program, we aim to do our work to build collective survivor power, rather than individual.

Chris Ash, a light-skinned white queer person smiles in their backyard. They have a blue shirt, short blue and purple hair, and blue glasses.

Survivor Leadership Program Manager

Chris Ash (they/them) started their community healing work in 1994 as both a suicide hotline volunteer and LGBTQ activist and organizer. Since then, they’ve worked as a dance teacher, music teacher, tutor for autistic kids, minister, doula, childbirth educator, payables specialist, server, retail worker, and writer while continuing organizing and community advocacy on the side in a variety of volunteer positions. In 2009, they started answering hotlines at a rape crisis center in town with a major university, and from there they spent almost a decade answering hotlines, doing hospital and court accompaniment for survivors, and training and supervising hotline staff. In 2018, they began their work at the North Carolina Coalition Against Sexual Assault providing training and technical assistance (TTA) to all of NC’s 78 rape crisis centers, first on human trafficking and eventually as the CDC-funded TTA provider for all the state’s federally-funded sexual violence prevention work. Currently, they are the Survivor Leadership Program Manager at the Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking, where they manage the National Survivor Network.

Jaden, a brown-skinned black trans man with a bald head, round glasses, a septum ring, wearing a light gray cropped shirt with an illustration of James Baldwin, a light beige unbuttoned shirt with Black circles on it, and a Labradorite crystal choker necklace.

Steering Group Member

Jaden is a survivor organizer, poet, educator, and cannabis enthusiast cultivating healing-centered spaces committed to collective liberation. Jaden is the Co-Director of Mirror Memoirs, an abolitionist oral history and organizing project intervening in rape culture by uplifting the healing and liberation of queer, trans/non-binary, intersex, Black, Indigenous, and people of color (QTIBIPOC) who are survivors of child sexual abuse. His work within grassroots and nonprofit organizations has included designing and leading programs for trans folks to access health services, training government agencies to better serve transgender people, participatory action research, and policy advocacy at the city, county, and state level. As a consultant, Jaden supports organizations, collectives, and professional groups to increase their knowledge and capacity to support and uplift communities that continue to be marginalized by white supremacy. He currently sits on the Board of Level Ground, an award-winning artist collective and production incubator. Jaden self-published his first poetry chapbook, Intentional Musings on Staying Alive When I Want To Die (2019), an honest depiction of navigating mental health and systemic oppression.
A brown-skinned man with a long white beard snuggles an adorable dog. The man is wearing a cap.
Learning and Training Group Co-Facilitator
Ron Kalemba is a longtime advocate against all forms of exploitation and has served as a trained consultant on a number of survivor-led projects. Professionally, he feels most at home being in community with fellow survivors.
An indigenous woman in her late 20’s with dark brown hair & brown eyes

Learning and Training Working Group Co-Facilitator

Rose Kalemba (she/her) is a writer, community organizer and educator, consultant, and holistic wellbeing advocate with lived experience of trafficking. Her work draws upon diverse streams of knowledge and experience with an approach that brings together research, science, compassion, intuition, and Indigenous cultural practices and trauma healing approaches. She has worked with a number of organizations and institutions as a consultant and collaborator and has been trained on best healthcare and research practices for trauma survivors.
Rebekah has fair skin with tattoos on her arm, and is wearing a black turtleneck, with red tortoiseshell glasses and her hair is reddish-brown and pulled up in a bun.

Membership and Community Working Group Co-Facilitator, Steering Group Member, SETTA Coordinator

Rebekah Layton (she/her/hers) is an educator, advocate, activist, and community member. Rebekah received her M.A. in Restorative Justice, where she focused much of her research and practice on building alternative responses to interpersonal, domestic, and sexual violence and advocating for survivors of violence who have been criminalized. She is a consultant at the local, national, and international levels. In her work with various organizations, she has aided in building programs centered around communities served in areas such as peer support, trauma recovery, community-based advocacy, and building community accountability. She is a coordinator for survivor engagement TTA projects coordinating NSN TA Consultants. She is an adjunct faculty of Social Justice and strives to create more accessible learning environments for her students. She is an advocate/activist for human rights at the intersection of human trafficking, disability justice, racial justice, gender justice, transformative justice, and social justice. She has held a governor-appointed seat on a statewide human trafficking council and task forces, advocating for survivors’ voices, identifying gaps, and making recommendations for the state’s legislature. She is also a volunteer restorative justice circle keeper with adult survivors of child sexual abuse. Rebekah is a survivor, a mother, a lover, a healer, and a dreamer.

Sinnamon Love is a Black woman with a medium brown complexion, long wavy grey hair, and is wearing a blue lace dress with buttons and an open collar.
Steering Group Member
Sinnamon Love is a visual storyteller, community organizer, Black Feminist Pornographer, and Executive Director of BIPOC Collective, an organization providing financial assistance and increased access to mental health and wellness resources for Black and Brown sex workers.
A white fem person with curly brown hair and blue eyes looks straight ahead. They are wearing a pink sweater and black dress. They stand in front of a white wall indoors against the natural light.
Membership and Community Working Group Co-Facilitator, Steering Group Member
Anastasia Lynge (they/she) is a program coordinator and consulting researcher, with expertise in familial and state-facilitated forms of human trafficking. Their current work explores the relationship between forced labor, state-sanctioned violence, and climate change. Trained as a clinical social worker, Anastasia previously provided clinical services for seven years in trauma and crisis-intervention settings. Outside of her work in the anti-trafficking movement, they engage in organizing that amplifies the calls to action of Indigenous communities in the southern Philippines.
Image is of a medium-skinned black man with a beard and mustache. He has long dreadlocks and is wearing glasses.

Membership and Community Working Group Co-Facilitator, Steering Group Member

Bakari Roscoe is a Black queer activist who organizes around food/housing justice and harm reduction, with a huge affinity toward diverting resources to community members fighting house-lessness and substance use disorder.
Activist speaking into megaphone
Steering Group Member
Chris Victoria is a Black Non-Binary activist with a passion for Black and Indigenous liberation. Radicalization through lived experience at the intersection of survival sex work, medical racism, and systemic oppression has fueled their passion for increased access to radical education and decriminalization of working class BIPOC LGBTQ+ communities. Their experience ranges from work in traditional non-profit spaces to grassroots organizing and large-scale mobilization of impacted populations. They are currently on the Board of Directors for Sex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP) USA.
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We allow all of our members who are involved in leadership to remain anonymous externally if they choose, given the sensitivity of disclosures of survivorship and the history of harassment of survivors who do not agree with mainstream anti-trafficking approaches. Among those who have chosen not to disclose or have not yet consented are:

Steering Group: Two additional members.

Membership and Community Working Group: One additional co-facilitator.

About Our Human Rights Framework

Our approach to ending and addressing human trafficking emphasizes survivors’ human rights – which were violated through their trafficking experience – most famously outlined in the 2000 United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons. Human rights considerations include recognition of the undeniable right to self-determination, safety, housing, education, and employment, as well as economic, social, political, medical, behavioral, and spiritual well-being. We cannot repair the harm of trafficking and empower survivors’ leadership without prioritizing these concerns.

Commitment to human rights aligns with proven prevention and resilience models. When survivors demonstrate particular vulnerabilities to re-trafficking or other forms of exploitation after their initial exit, ensuring holistic wellbeing through a human rights lens contributes to increased resilience. This process involves reducing risk factors and drivers for human trafficking, including poverty, social inequality, and lack of economic opportunities. Using a human rights lens through the spectrum of service delivery – including emergency services, needs and goals assessments, and long-term case management provision – increases the likelihood that survivors gain and sustain accomplishments, a sense of safety, and individual agency.

Using a human rights lens throughout our approach to survivor empowerment and policy work fosters survivor wellbeing and increases survivors’ effectiveness as advocates and leaders. A human rights approach also leads to policy and protocols that are inclusive, are less likely to have harmful impacts on already-marginalized communities, and that help survivors regain agency that was taken from them through trafficking.

Please see our full Values Statement for more information about how we approach our work.

View our 2022 Report here: LINK

Support Our Work

The National Survivor Network is a program of CAST. Please consider a donation to the National Survivor Network. Be sure to indicate in the note line that the donation is for the NSN.

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