MONSE Announces FY25 Anti-Human Trafficking Grant Awards
$325,000 awarded to eleven organizations working to support trauma-informed services for survivors
Baltimore, MD (Tuesday, October 22, 2024) – Today, the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement (MONSE) announced $325,000 in grant awards to eleven organizations working to support trauma-informed services for human trafficking survivors. These grant awards are supported by the agency’s General Fund budget.
Baltimore and Maryland continue to be one of the highest in the nation in calls per capita coming into the National Human Trafficking Hotline. As part of the City’s mission to identify and address human trafficking in all of its forms, each year MONSE provides microgrants directly to community-based organizations supporting survivors of human trafficking and/or promoting awareness around the issue.
For Fiscal Year 2025, TurnAround Inc. and Araminta Freedom will each receive one-time $50,000 awards while Maryland Volunteer Lawyers Service, Let’s Thrive Baltimore, City of Refuge Baltimore, Drink at the Well, the Tahirih Justice Center, HER Resiliency, Safe Exit Initiative, Asylee Women Enterprise, and Uplift Alliance Inc. will each receive one-time $25,000 awards.
These funds will help integrate the efforts of community-based partners into the City’s broader anti-human trafficking efforts in partnership with the Baltimore City Human Trafficking Collaborative.
“Community-based organizations that directly support survivors of human trafficking must be at the forefront of our collaborative solutions,” said MONSE Director Stefanie Mavronis. “MONSE is proud to continue to support these crucial efforts through our annual Anti-Human Trafficking Grant awards and looks forward to increased coordination and collaboration with these partners in the year ahead.”
MONSE’s commitment to directly financing community-based organizations working to address human trafficking issues, many of which have never received City funding prior to the Scott Administration, is expressly outlined in Baltimore’s Comprehensive Violence Prevention Plan.
To date, the agency has issued 43 awards and approximately $1.55 million in funding to organizations supporting survivors of human trafficking, sex trafficking, and/or labor trafficking including LGBTQ+ and Latino survivors.
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About MONSE’s Anti-Human Trafficking Work
Understanding that it takes a unified, inter-agency, and cross-state approach to build a strong network of individuals and organizations who work together to bring the perpetrators of trafficking to light and to ensure that all identified survivors receive the essential services they need to recover and heal, as part of MONSE’s Victim Services lane, the agency works hand-in-hand with the Baltimore City Human Trafficking Collaborative to combat both Sex and Labor Trafficking in the City of Baltimore by:
- Raising awareness through education, law enforcement training, and media campaigns
- Supporting both State and Federal investigations and prosecutions of Traffickers
- Supporting human trafficking survivors by providing them access to quality services through a victim-centered, trauma-informed approach
Through this work, MONSE has partnered with Mercy Medical Center to implement Baltimore’s Blue Dot Human Trafficking Initiative, designed to ensure that no survivors of trafficking fall through the cracks, and that all identified survivors receive services. In 2023, the Blue Dot Human Trafficking Initiative won the “Presidential Award for Extraordinary Efforts To Combat Trafficking in Persons”.
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