NoVo Foundation Commits $10 Million to Help End Sexual Exploitation
The New York City-based NoVo Foundation has announced a three-year, $10 million commitment in support of programs in the United States aimed at reducing and preventing commercial sexual exploitation.
The announcement of the Life Story Grants initiative follows the launch last year of Life Story: Moments of Change, an online platform designed to elevate the voices of survivors of sexual exploitation whose paths to the sex trade involved poverty, discrimination, intergenerational violence and trauma, and/or harm in school, foster care, housing, or the healthcare and criminal justice systems. The new program will focus on those who are disproportionately affected by commercial sexual exploitation but are largely invisible — including Native American and other girls and women of color, immigrants, and trans women — as well as on the critical life moments when "system interactions could have gone a different way and led to a different life trajectory."
With the goal of addressing systemic failures at those critical moments and closing "on-ramps" to sexual exploitation, the program will support system-focused strategies in six areas