“Break the Chains” Breaks Records

Post a Comment » Written on May 20th, 2009     
Filed under: News
CHICAGO, IL (May 20, 2009) – Donors have given $105,600 to the Break the Chains project since February 1 this year, Ruth Hill, the executive director of the Department of Women Ministries (WM), announced today.

Young women wait anxiously as IJM and local authorities in South Asia raid a brothel.

Since the department initiated the anti-human trafficking initiative in February 2008, Covenanters have donated $332,000—a record for any WM project. The department’s two-year Educate the Girls project raised $276,000.

Hill said she is amazed that giving this year is outpacing the project’s first ten months, when Covenanters donated $205,000. Normally, contributions drop off in the second year of a project because many people donate once and already have given in the first year, she explains. “For it to go up is totally unexpected,” Hill said.

“There is no doubt that the money is going to impact a great number of lives,” Hill said. The funds are evenly divided between the Hindustani Covenant Church and International Justice Mission. Both work to rescue and rehabilitate modern-day slaves.

Hill said that she is excited about the funds, but, “For me, it’s less about the money than the awareness that people are engaging in the issue of human trafficking. It represents people getting involved in this issue.”

Covenanters are responding, in part, because they are being exposed to the issue in multiple ways, Hill said. The topic has increasingly been in the news and the subject of feature films and documentaries.

Repeated exposure to the issue over a brief period of time is what led Hill to initiate the project, she said. “It was coming at me in so many directions, I had to start saying, ‘Lord what do you want me to do with this?’ ”

For more information on resources and ways the denomination is fighting human trafficking, click here.

Photo credit: International Justice Mission

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