Annalisa Enrile joins Dr. Sandie Morgan to turn hope from a feeling into a working tool for anti-trafficking organizations, with three steps for survivor leaders, social workers, students, and anyone who wants to support the movement.
Chapters
- (00:00) - Hope Is More Than a Feeling
- (01:58) - Hope as a Verb and What to Measure
- (08:54) - How Traffickers Sell a Better Life
- (11:54) - Steps One and Two: A Clear Goal and a Mapped Path
- (15:42) - Step Three: Cultivating Agency
- (17:20) - Making the Case for Capacity to Funders
- (25:19) - Mentorship as the Ultimate Capacity Builder
- (30:10) - Final Thoughts: Operationalize Hope
About Annalisa Enrile
Annalisa Enrile, PhD, MSW, is a teaching professor at the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work, where she is also course lead for the Doctor of Social Work (DSW) program. Her anti-trafficking work began in the Philippines, and one of her first programs in the field served girls. Today she uses design thinking to build prevention programs and interventions that turn hope into action, and she speaks out against exploitative migrant labor. Her students in the school's Philippines immersion program complete capstone projects with grassroots organizations there. She writes about hope as a daily practice for social workers, activists and communities in Psychology Today, in pieces including "Hope Is a Verb," "The Right Now: Hope in the Present Tense," and "Taking Up Space." She credits her mentors with keeping her in this work, among them the late Uncle Roy Morales, an elder in the Filipino community.
Key Points
• Decide what success looks like before you pick a metric. A funder asked Annalisa's first anti-trafficking program, a program for girls, to report the girls' GPA, which had nothing to do with its goal. Picture the outcome first, build the measurements from that picture, and teach funders which metrics to look for.
• Answer a trafficker's "better life" with questions. A survivor Annalisa learned from asks girls who are being groomed to describe it concretely: where are you living, what are you doing, what will it get you? The answer shows how small that picture is next to the world, and whatever is promised, the bottom line is what is taken.
• Step one is a clear goal: name the problem you are solving now. Trafficking is tangled up with so many root causes that it overwhelms people, and a precise goal narrows it to something a team can act on.
• Step two is choosing your pathway on purpose. Equifinality means many pathways lead to the same goal; mapping the one you pick gives you guideposts that show you are heading in the right direction.
• Step three is cultivating agency before the opportunity arrives, through capacity building, awareness raising, trainings and coalition building. When the moment comes, you know who to call and the car is already charged.
• Fund the work between emergencies. Organizations are always preparing, debriefing or somewhere else in the cycle, and an opportunity to help or transform that finds a team unready is lost.
• Put capacity on the grant application. The grant form has no line for it now, and Annalisa says the field has to rewrite the application, starting with helping funders see that survivor leaders lead and heal at the same time.
• Count people as resources, and look for mentors beyond those senior to you. Uncle Roy Morales told Annalisa that movements succeed on talent and time, not just treasure. She learns from peers and from her 17-year-old niece, and experienced mentors can tell you whether the light at the end of the tunnel is the goal or a train.
Resources
• Annalisa Enrile (USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work)
• Hope Is a Verb (Psychology Today)
• The Right Now: Hope in the Present Tense (Psychology Today)
• Taking Up Space (Psychology Today)
• Ensure Justice (Global Center for Women and Justice)
• Amplify (Global Center for Women and Justice)
