Project to help sex trafficking survivors
Harriet’s Hope is more than just a place to live
Mandie Knight stood in front of the abandoned motel and shivered – as surely as if someone had run a finger down her spine – as she felt the ghosts of all the evil that had happened here to her and to others. The specter of death, violence, addiction and rape and abuse hung in the air and cloaked her.
She bent down and picked up a broken chunk of concrete. And she launched it through a window.
Then she did it again.
And again.
And again.
The sound of the fragile glass splintering into shards washed away some of the pain from her years of being trafficked for sex on the streets of Greater Columbus, and it was salve for another piece of her wounded soul.
To know that on that very site in Franklinton will soon rise a 52-unit affordable housing complex specifically to serve as a haven for survivors of human trafficking, a place where women just like Knight can stabilize themselves
in a safe environment with all the on-site support and social services they need to repair their livesis cathartic.
“It was so amazing to be the one to start demolition there, to watch the bulldozers tear through that building and wipe it away and know something beautiful will rise from it,” said Knight, a 31-year-old wife and mother who escaped the streets some six years ago.
“It’s symbolic to me. It’s kind of like our stories – the women who make it out on the other side – that the space of that old hotel is given a clean slate. Me and my survivor sisters were the same: The old side of me was demolished and broken down, and then I was built back up into something beautiful.”
What she is referring to is Harriet’s Hope, a $13 million housing complex that will break ground next year on the site of that former motel on Broad Street that was demolished earlier this year. It is a partnership of the Columbus Metropolitan Housing Authority and Beacon 360 Management, a minority- and woman-run nonprofit real estate development and management firm based in Columbus that is focused on advocating for vulnerable populations.
This is the first project of its kind in Ohio and most likely in the nation, advocates of human-trafficking survivors say.
The Harriet’s Hope project – named for Harriet Tubman, the slave-turnedabolitionist who helped so many other enslaved people escape bondage – got a boost just this month with the announcement of a $1 million grant through the Federal Home Loan Bank of Cincinnati’s Affordable Housing Program. Other funding sources include $9 million in low-income-housing tax equity from Ohio Capital Corporation for Housing, loans, grants and money from the CMHA itself.
The campus will include one- and two-bedroom apartments, a multipurpose space, meeting rooms, recreational and green space, and the women who live there will have access to on-site computers and laundry. The first tenants – who will receive transferrable housing vouchers from the CMHA and pay no more than 30% of their income as rent if they are employed – are expected to move in sometime in 2023. Stable and safe affordable housing is critical, but the wraparound services that will be provided on site to these women who have suffered repeated trauma is the real key to success, said Celia Kendall, Beacon 360’s chief executive officer and the woman who conceived this project.
“Harriet’s Hope speaks to how we have the opportunity to just not provide housing and get people back on their feet but that we have the power of helping to heal folks,” she said. “This project says to these women that they do have value.”
While some partners for Harriet’s Hope are still being put into place, what the developers do know is this: The Salvation Army will handle on-site case management and Alvis will provide addiction recovery services. Kaleidoscope Youth Center will be involved to help those who identify as part of the LBGTQ community, and the Legal Aid Society will be on hand to assist those dealing with the court system.
Columbus Public Health will be a partner, and on-site childcare will even be available for those women who have been reunited with their children.
“We have tried to come up with a solution
to every possible barrier that someone would have to getting back on their feet and to rebuilding their lives,” Kendall said. “Folks will have to do nothing more than come downstairs to get help and hope.”
The idea for the project came to Kendall in a seminal moment in 2017 after she had watched a documentary called “Dreamcatcher” about the dangerous and damaging underworld of sex trafficking.
While in Chicago for a professional conference that year, she sought out the women who made the film and now run the Dreamcatcher Foundation. She tagged along with them for a night of street outreach. Many of the trafficking victims she saw that night were minorities, and for Kendall, who is African American, it was a personal awakening.
She spent time with a woman who was about to deliver a baby boy. Kendall found herself thinking of her own son at home and all the promise his life held. And she cried over the despair that was ahead for the baby inside the womb of this woman she had just met.
Then she went back to her high-end hotel and tried to sleep. She couldn’t. What she had seen had changed her.
“I was laying there in this expensive hotel swathed in privilege, and this whole community of people who looked just like me was awake out there on the streets,” she said. “That didn’t sit with me. How could I not do something?”
And so the concept of Harriet’s Hope was born.
Kendall intended to propose it for Chicago or elsewhere, but research showed her that the need was right here
where she lives: Ohio, which ranks fourth in the country for human trafficking, has generated more than 9,000 statewide contacts to the National Human Trafficking Hotline in the past 12 years. More than 1,200 victims and survivors were reported in 2019 alone, the most recent year for which data is available.
A report earlier this year showed that the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Ohio, which includes Columbus, charged the second-highest number of federal human trafficking defendants in the nation in 2020. And national data shows that someone is trafficked every 30 seconds, and more than 80% of them are girls and women used in the sex trade.
“Trafficking is not a choice,” Kendall said. “And that’s what Harriet’s Hope is about. It is designed to give the little boy that woman had a chance.”
For the CMHA, the decision to collaborate with Beacon 360 on this project was an easy one, Chief Operating Officer Scott Scharlach said, even though the rent subsidies for these women represent a $10 million commitment from the CMHA – no small thing.
“We are very deep in terms of serving special needs populations to get back on their feet,” Scharlach said. “Without housing you can’t stabilize and you can’t recover. When Beacon sat down with us, it really hit a chord. These women can stay here until they recover, and then they can move to the private market and take the rental assistance with them. This is life-changing.”
Knight, who is resource manager for Freedom a la Cart – a Columbus catering business and cafe that supports survivors of human trafficking – sees Harriet’s Hope as transformational. She said she’s so proud to live in a community that cares about its most vulnerable.
“Housing is the hardest part for someone exiting the sex trade,” said Knight, who is among a group of women who serve as advisors for the project.
“These women all have a history of trauma and abuse and they want out. They’re getting their kids back, they’re getting jobs, they’re doing the right thing but they can’t find a place to live. So this housing project is going to be a beautiful opportunity for the women who have otherwise been checked off every list by all of society.”
To be connected with services and supports to get help and stay safe, report a tip about a potential case of human trafficking, or find service referrals, contact the U.S. National Human Trafficking Hotline by calling 1-888-373-7888 or by texting “Befree” (233733).
hzachariah@dispatch.com