Insights for Change is our new series to pose questions and share short insights (our own and others’) for thinking creatively about faith and social change. They may be full-baked, half-baked, or just a pile of raw ingredients to play with. We hope they start conversation or inspire ideas. We invite you to add your own thoughts, experiences, and ideas to the mix.
I recently had a conversation with a social entrepreneur in Mexico designing a new approach to tackle the problem of human trafficking. She noted how reports and stories on trafficking survivors tend to share basic information about them—maybe some demographic information and the broad brushstrokes of what happened to them. But shelters doing case intake with survivors often document far more detail about each case, which then sits idly on a physical or digital shelf. When she started studying those files, she found a treasure trove of information that revealed patterns about how the system of trafficking functions, particularly how traffickers use the basic social and economic infrastructure of our communities to engage in trafficking.
Frustrated by the limited impact of the traditional prevention efforts she was engaged in, studying the files allowed her to see how she could create a more systemic intervention to make it harder for traffickers to function. Her organization SINTRATA now has partnerships with Uber, hotel chains, and others repeatedly mentioned in those shelter files to equip their frontline workers to identify trafficking happening in plain sight, and in so doing, to help stop it.
As faith communities, we engage in so many essential social service efforts in our communities. It is sacred work to be present to people marginalized by the systems of our societies. It is also sacred work to change those systems. As we serve, we have the opportunity to learn, collect data, spot patterns that can help point to systemic solutions. What patterns and insights about poverty, homelessness, mass incarceration, racism, violence, polarization, education inequity, or any of the social challenges we bear witness to in our work, sit untapped in the stories of the people we serve? Can we level up our service to spot new solutions?
Does your community have a methodology or practice for leveraging your proximity to a social problem to surface insights about how to solve it? If so, we’d love to hear about it.
Photo by Akhilesh Sharma on Unsplash