OUT OF THE SHADOWS
Street Grace works with churches to end sex trafficking of minors
Street Grace has been working to end domestic sex trafficking of minors in Atlanta for the past 10 years — and now the faith-based nonprofit is expanding its reach to Houston.
The group also found an ideal person to move its mission forward — author, playwright, advocate Katherine McGibbon, a survivor of sex trafficking herself, who will serve as the new director of outreach for Houston-based efforts.
“We plan to mirror exactly what they’ve been doing in Atlanta here in Houston,” McGibbon said.
CEO Bob Rodgers said that McGibbon’s name was the first to come up when conversations began about expanding the Atlanta operation to Texas.
“People said, ‘If you’re doing something in Houston, you need to talk to Kathy,’ ” he recalled. “She was immediately a genuine and authentic person when we met. When people spoke about her, there was a sense of appreciation and admiration.”
Rodgers felt confident that McGibbon would be an ideal fit with the organization — and her sense of dedication to the cause would carry Street Grace’s efforts forward.
The nonprofit celebrates its 10th anniversary this year. It started with a group of church leaders in Atlanta who wanted to unite and make a difference in the city.
“It was a collaboration of churches who said, ‘Let’s pull our resources together and have an immediate impact,’ ” Rodgers said.
Over the past decade, the mission evolved into a threepronged attack on trafficking of minors, involving changing policy on the state and federal level, stopping demand through technology and raising awareness in children and adults.
The central component is education, Rodgers said.
“Unless we can make this something people can wrap their minds around, they will continue to walk past it,” he said. “That’s the only way you can beat stuff that’s been in the dark. You pull it out of the shadows. You shine a light on it.”
Rodgers said that churches and synagogues in Atlanta were willing to do just that — from the pulpit and the sanctuary.
“This is a human issue,” he said. “It breaks down barriers. If you look back in history, when people of faith rise up against social issues, they have an impact. I believe the local church is the hope of the world.”
Recently, several churches in Houston wanted to fight sex trafficking and discovered Street Grace.
“They literally knocked on our door,” Rodgers said. “Houston is opening in exactly the same way Atlanta was launched 10 years prior.”
By the time McGibbon assumed the position, Street Grace had everything in place so she could get to work right away, planning for informative presentations at schools and in faith-based communities.
“It was boots on the ground, let’s go,” McGibbon said.
She explained that when meeting with youth, the organizations focuses on building self-worth. “We go in with love,” she said. “You need to value yourself, because there are people who will try to take that from you.”
In addition, she wants to create a safe space for teens to open up about their experiences. “Sometimes, they are in a position for trafficking, and they don’t even know it,” she said.
Equipping educators is another key focus, McGibbon said.
It’s all about spreading the word. “We don’t turn away any calls for presentations, whether it’s for two or 200,” she said.
Another major component of Street Grace’s work is ending the demand by using technology, social media and even a bot to intercept calls and target the buyers.
The organization also works to introduce and support policy that can stop the sex trafficking of minors.
“We can’t prevent anything unless we change some laws,” McGibbon said.
McGibbon previously worked on the restorative care side of sex trafficking. “When this opportunity became available, I saw a real need to get in front of the problem,” she said. “I wanted to try a different approach. I wanted to end the demand for restorative care by stopping it before it started.”
Her own journey to raise awareness of the issue began with her healing process.
She was in her first year of college in Houston when she met a man who started grooming her for trafficking. The process took a year, and by the end, he asked her to move to Dallas to start a business with him.
“He proposed a plan,” McGibbon recalled. “I thought it was love. But when we got to Dallas, I realized I was in big trouble.”
The next nine months of her life were a blur, a time where she removed herself from her body just to survive. “Any bad thing that could happen, happened to me,” she said. “The only way I could survive was to take myself out of it.”
When McGibbon finally got away from the perpetrator, she thought she had relieved herself of a terrible boyfriend.
“I didn’t even know what sex trafficking was,” she said. “I started researching and writing out my feelings. My healing process consisted of going to church and writing.”
When McGibbon saw the words of her diary and compared them to what she had been learning, everything started to add up.
“That journal became a book, and that book became a play,” she said.
Sharing her story had healing power — for others and for her personally, McGibbon discovered.
“When I was talking to women and would tell them my experience, they would break down and say, ‘This happened to me,’ ” McGibbon recalled. “I met so many survivors of trafficking. Telling my story was contributing to their healing process.
They thought they were alone until they heard someone else had been there, too.”
By publishing her book, “Destined: the Unspoken Revealed,” and premiering her play of the same name in 2017 — she was able to reach even more people.
She also wanted to give back by volunteering and started working with Elijah Rising and Rescue Houston.
She served as a program director in restorative care for Elijah Rising for a year in 2017 to build the program.
McGibbon thought she would always work in restorative care until she learned about Street
Grace and visited its headquarters in Georgia.
“I saw the amazing things Street Grace was doing in Atlanta,” she said. “It just tugged at my heart. Everyone was so into really ending this thing. I saw exactly what they were doing, and I was so impressed.”
She signed up to bring the same program to her hometown. Instead of Houston having a reputation as being a hub for human trafficking, she wants the city to be at the forefront of the fight against it.
“I want Houston to be known as the city that helped put an end to sex trafficking,” she said.
McGibbon was also drawn to the way Street Grace relied on faith to do its work.
“Street Grace was birthed out of the churches in Georgia,” she said. “The churches saw a problem and said, ‘We’re going to take this on, no matter what.’ We have a lot of churches in Houston. I believe in a higher power, and I believe in the faith community standing together.”