Empowering Young Men In Ending Sexual Exploitation

September, 2014

Although high school hallways are quiet during the summer, the prevention team at the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation has stayed busy.  In addition to planning and scheduling with our school partners, the team has greatly expanded the reach of the program.  This expansion is made possible by training additional facilitators both in Chicago and around the country. 

            In order to increase the number of young men being educated without altering the amount of time in a day, we realized that we needed to increase the number of educators.  The problem was we didn’t have the budget to hire more staff, and even if we did hire more staff we wouldn’t be reaching beyond the Chicago city limits.  Fortunately, an organization that already had a team of educators approached us looking for a curriculum to present to young men in their teens.  We worked out a partnership to train their educators to facilitate Empowering Young Men all across their state.  Later, an organization from yet another reached out, as did an organization from Chicago.  By the end of the summer, we had trained three groups of educators, from four different states, and have two more similar trainings lined up for the fall.

            This rapid, and unexpected, expansion will mean at least 60 new EYM facilitators empowering young men in five different states to end sexual exploitation.  CAASE empowers roughly 700 young men every year.  If you multiply that by the power of partnership, the number grows exponentially.