370: Why Mentorship Fails Without Shared Lived Experience

Martha Trujillo joins Dr. Sandie Morgan to ask what changes when communities stop seeing vulnerable youth as problems to be managed and start seeing them as young people in need of support.

Martha Trujillo

Martha Trujillo is the founder of Full Circle Orange County, an organization dedicated to supporting risk-impacted and at-risk students through mentorship, education, and community. Her work is informed by lived experience: she grew up in Orange County and faced significant challenges as a young person, including foster care, gang involvement, expulsion from school, juvenile detention, substance use, and victimization. She now uses her story to guide and empower students facing similar obstacles. Trujillo holds a master’s degree in criminology from UC Irvine and a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from California State University, Fullerton, and is preparing to pursue a doctorate in education at UC Irvine. Through Full Circle, she practices “diversion through mentorship,” combining workshops, re-entry support, and one-on-one guidance for youth in schools, group homes, and detention centers across Orange County and beyond.

Key Points

Full Circle Orange County’s mission is preventing youth incarceration in adulthood by helping kids be identified early as victims rather than written off as criminals.
Martha’s “feeding before teaching” approach — breaking bread with youth before any workshop — builds trust and recognizes the unmet basic needs that often shape kids’ behavior.
Lived experience is one of three pillars (alongside academic training and direct work with youth) that shapes how Martha builds rapport with students no one else has been able to reach.
Early human trafficking prevention should begin between ages 9 and 14, in language that’s age-appropriate but not avoidant — and not reserved only for kids in poverty-stricken environments.
“Dual status” youth (both foster and probation-involved) need support that recognizes them as children first, not as labels — and the juvenile justice system has resources to help them, if we use them well.
Mentors who share appropriate pieces of their own story give kids something to relate to; without that connection, real rapport is rarely possible.
Survivors going through religious rites of passage may be carrying hidden trauma; faith communities have a vital role in trauma-informed prevention conversations.
Coming full circle: Martha was expelled from Nicolas Junior High in eighth grade — and years later returned to receive an honorary promotion certificate alongside its current eighth graders.

Resources

Transcript

[00:00:00] Martha Trujillo: They need something to relate to, and if they don’t have something to relate to, they’re not going to be able to connect with you.

[00:00:10] Delaney: What if the kids we label as troubled are actually the ones we failed to see in time? One mentor’s story shows how early connection can change everything. This conversation asks, what changes when communities stop seeing vulnerable youth as problems to be managed and start seeing them as young people in need of support?

[00:00:31] Hi, I’m Delaney. I’m a student here at Vanguard University, and I help produce this show. Today, Sandie talks with Martha Trujillo, founder of Full Circle Orange County. Martha works with at-risk youth through mentorship, workshops, and prevention education, shaped by lived experience and academic training.

[00:00:50] And now, here’s their conversation.

[00:00:54] Sandie Morgan: Martha Trujillo, you have been here at Vanguard several times, but this is your first time as an Ending Human Trafficking Podcast guest. Welcome.

[00:01:07] Martha Trujillo: Thank you so much for having me.

[00:01:09] Sandie Morgan: I have been so inspired by you, and I’m amazed at what you do with our youth every year in Know More, Do Better. How does it make you feel to stand in front of hundreds of middle schoolers and be part of their prevention story?

[00:01:34] Martha Trujillo: I think it’s super inspiring, and I’m very humbled to be asked to be the speaker for this event for the third year. As much as it’s prevention, it’s also intervention because some kids are actively probably experiencing some things. To prevent future harm happening is such a testament to my life, and it’s so much more to me, because it also reminds me why we do this work as a collective community and just seeing all the different organizations here and working collaboratively. It’s just so heartwarming to see that connection.

[00:02:15] Sandie Morgan: Well, this year we had 659 middle schoolers, and they were just hanging on your every word. If you think about classroom management this time of the season, and kids are scrolling or chatting — no, they were absolutely quiet. What a joy to get to have you now on the podcast. You actually have finished your master’s. You’ve launched your own organization. What is Full Circle Orange County about?

[00:02:57] Martha Trujillo: I’m glad you asked that question because I just recently revamped everything a little bit. My mission and vision for my organization — well, the mission is to prevent youth incarceration in adulthood. It really stuck out to me with incarceration. That’s the ultimate thing I want to prevent, and it took some time for me to try to understand what it is I’m trying to do with this work with incarceration, because a lot of victims, like myself as a survivor, were not ever identified as such. So I want to help a lot of kids to be identified early on as victims as opposed to just being criminals. Full Circle really supports youth where they’re at, in group homes, detention centers, in the community, and I provide schools as well, just workshop-based mentoring, which is something I created on my own, which is something I love to do.

[00:03:55] So I love mentoring, and I love doing workshops, so I combine both. I do mentoring in real time with the youths while I’m doing a workshop. I support them with re-entry services. So any money that I get through my organization, I support them with food, clothing, any type of bus pass, shoes. For Christmas, I gave thirty LA County youth fifty-dollar gift cards to DoorDash and twenty-five dollar gift cards to Amazon. So it was just amazing to do this for them and give them gifts. Essentially, I provide workshops, and I teach them about gang prevention or intervention if they’re already in a gang, human trafficking, exploitation, because that sometimes goes hand in hand, and they’re not two separate entities. And I love doing it. I just love mentoring kids and going places and providing them my insight. And I swear to you, Dr. Sandie, as much as I can have six hundred and fifty kids listen to me in a stadium is the same thing if I have two or five or ten students in front of me. I find that so rewarding.

[00:05:03] Sandie Morgan: Wow. I love that analogy — two or three or 650, it doesn’t matter. So let’s go back and let’s talk about how you began to see your personal journey from adversity to education and advocacy, and how you integrate your support, your mentoring for other youth. I especially feel like the focus is often just keep the kids safe, but we don’t look ahead to when they’re adults and might become part of, on a path for incarceration. So talk to us about your journey.

[00:05:50] Martha Trujillo: Okay, so my journey with education. Let’s start with that journey. It wasn’t always great. I loved learning, don’t get me wrong, but as a young person, I didn’t have too much support with understanding or having the education tailored to my needs. I didn’t have an IEP, even though I probably needed one. My mom wasn’t really in the mix of all that stuff after my mom got custody of me and my sister after being in foster care. With me being in juvenile hall, being on probation, getting arrested so many times, education was always out of touch for me, but I wanted it, so I educated myself a lot.

[00:06:32] In juvenile hall, I read — one of the books that I really liked was The Count of Monte Cristo. It was such a revelation because it’s crazy how that literature, even though it’s very old, I connected with it. I found that when he was incarcerated, he wasn’t supposed to be there, and he was getting mentored by somebody in there as well, and using your time wisely was essential. So then I started just writing and reading and educating myself. So education started in a very dark place, it stayed there for a long time, but then I started evolving from there. Where my journey for advocacy really started to flourish was when I started working at STRTPs with transition services.

[00:07:28] I think that’s where I had met Kendra a few times and some other great people. Great organization. Gave me the opportunity. I didn’t have many skills yet as far as working with youth, but I knew that I wanted to do it, and it connected with me, so I learned a lot there. That’s the first time I learned about the term CSEC.

[00:07:50] Sandie Morgan: So you’re using lots of acronyms, and we have listeners all over the nation, the world. Let’s break them down a little bit. You just said STRTP. What is that? Is that something you use to ride a horse?

[00:08:07] Martha Trujillo: Thank you for letting me know. I’ll definitely speak a little more later. Okay. So it’s a short-term therapeutic program, treatment program.

[00:08:16] Sandie Morgan: Okay.

[00:08:17] Martha Trujillo: It’s supposed to support youth in foster care or probation. Sometimes kids are dual status. I was a dual status kid. What that means is, you’re a probation and a foster kid, so you’re both.

[00:08:31] Sandie Morgan: Does that feel, from a personal perspective, like a double whammy?

[00:08:35] Martha Trujillo: Yeah,

[00:08:36] Sandie Morgan: You had two strikes before you even walked out the front door.

[00:08:40] Martha Trujillo: Because it’s like this, Dr. Morgan, and this is what I’ve always had to struggle with throughout my whole life. I felt like the probation part of it, the criminal stuff, outweighed the foster kid stuff. Mind you, I went to foster care way before I ever became criminalized by the system or got incarcerated. I got incarcerated at 13. I went into foster care at 10. For some reason, even going into foster care and being jumped into a gang at the same age, at 10, the bad outweighed everything that was being done against me. I felt like I was the one that was perpetrating all these different things to myself, and it wasn’t that way. It was the other way around. I couldn’t see past the labels that were given to me. Nobody really explained what foster care was to me. I didn’t understand any of these labels fully until I was an adult, until I started going to community college, and they’re like, “Oh, there’s foster youth services.”

[00:09:47] And I’m like, “What does that mean, foster youth services? Why does that matter?” I didn’t like those terms. I never would have shared those terms out loud because I felt they would have made other students look at me like, “You’re different.” I was already a —

[00:10:04] Sandie Morgan: Oh.

[00:10:04] Martha Trujillo: Not many students were moms at that time either. So I’m like, “I’m already a non-traditional student as it is. Why do I gotta add all these different labels?” But I did accept them because there was so much support, and I needed it badly.

[00:10:23] Sandie Morgan: Okay. So this was your on-ramp to get the kind of services and support that you needed. Let’s start with — you mentioned you were 10 years old. Where were you when you were 10 years old?

[00:10:41] Martha Trujillo: Geographically, I was here in Orange County in Fullerton, still living here. I love my city.

[00:10:48] Sandie Morgan: Aw.

[00:10:48] Martha Trujillo: I think 10 years old was such a pivotal moment for me because that’s where I just left my childhood, and 10 years old is still so young for a kid to say, “Oh, I’m not a kid anymore.” It’s so sad. I do think back a lot. When I share my story I’m like, wow, 10-year-old kids — when I see them happy and enjoying their life, like my son, he’s 11 now, that kid still goes to sleep with a teddy bear. I’m like, “Okay, I’m doing a good job. He’s not growing —”

[00:11:23] Sandie Morgan: Aw,

[00:11:24] Martha Trujillo: You know what I’m —

[00:11:25] Sandie Morgan: That’s so good.

[00:11:26] Martha Trujillo: But at 10 years old I was already smoking weed and doing crystal meth.

[00:11:30] Sandie Morgan: Oh.

[00:11:31] Martha Trujillo: What type of guidance was I really getting? Not the right kind. So at 10 years old, I was already living a very chaotic life.

[00:11:44] Sandie Morgan: And by the time you were 13?

[00:11:47] Martha Trujillo: At 13, I caught my first case because I was already a gang member, quote unquote — gang affiliated. Going to juvenile hall was a whole — I’m not gonna say bad words. It was a mind trip, and I think that it made me feel a little bit exploited because you have to get nude in front of people. I had already been sexually active in ways that I shouldn’t have been with older people.

[00:12:22] Sandie Morgan: Mm-hmm.

[00:12:23] Martha Trujillo: I still felt very vulnerable to do this in front of these professionals. So it just felt really weird. At that point, I just felt really off.

[00:12:33] Sandie Morgan: So let’s think about how you, in overcoming those challenges, how does that influence the way you work with students who are in similar struggles?

[00:12:49] Martha Trujillo: I try to use my lived experience, my experiences that I’ve encountered, to shape my workshops. I back up my workshops with my academic experience and my work experience, so I’m very blessed to have all three types of experiences working hands-on with kids — through work, my academic background, and then my lived experience. All three really go in hand with each other and I use it very wisely. But I will say that my lived experience, my survivor-led workshops, is led by that experience first and foremost because it’s important. I use approaches that many people might not use often. I have this thing called feeding before teaching. Before I even do a workshop with youth, I break bread with them. I make sure that we’re eating before. I nourish them. I provide them something. They’re allowing me into their space. I want them to feel — like, I want to feel thankful and honored and show them that they allowed me in their space by providing them with this offering.

[00:14:03] “Here, you guys. I love you guys so much. Thank you for having me here. We’re gonna eat real quick as a community, and then I’m gonna teach you guys something real cool.” Something informative. By doing that, it shows a lot. Because I remember being a kid and just always being hungry. Just being hungry. When people would go to the neighborhood, there was a park — actually, I do remember him, Mr. Silva, he’s from the Fullerton School District, and he would go and bring pizza. As much as sometimes we didn’t like him because he was a math teacher,

[00:14:41] Sandie Morgan: Oh.

[00:14:42] Martha Trujillo: We started connecting with him. We’re like, “All right, and you’re down to come to our neighborhood? All right, cool.” That’s something else, too. While we’re over there smoking and drinking and doing all sorts of stuff, the fact that they’re able to meet us where we’re at the most chaotic, depressive way that we are connecting — because we were all depressed.

[00:15:02] All of us — now I think back, we were all so lost, and we just wanted to have somebody understand us, but we were doing it in non-healthy ways. Everything that I do, I try to connect it back on doing for the kids differently, and it works, Sandie. It works, and I get so much good feedback from the way that I do my workshops. So much so that I was able to start a business. That just shows testament of the work that I do and

[00:15:34] Sandie Morgan: Mm.

[00:15:34] Martha Trujillo: the love that I have for the kids and how much we have to support them and guide them.

[00:15:39] Sandie Morgan: So here’s my dilemma. I try to encourage people to do prevention with kids at an early age, and when I first started trying to get into high schools, I had high school principals tell me that the subject was too mature and the students wouldn’t understand. Well, I don’t believe that,

[00:16:07] Martha Trujillo: No.

[00:16:07] Sandie Morgan: but I do understand that not every 10-year-old is going to be in the same situation. But I think we’re waiting too long to start prevention, and so I’d love to have your insight. You have an 11-year-old. So if I think about, am I reaching out to Martha when she was 10,

[00:16:34] Martha Trujillo: No.

[00:16:35] Sandie Morgan: or to an 11-year-old who goes to bed with a teddy bear, what is the range of prevention and conversations we can have with a 10-year-old?

[00:16:47] Martha Trujillo: My son is very intuitive and he’s very smart. But he also is very curious. Let’s take away the intuition and the smartness — they’re curious. Kids are always gonna be curious. And they’re living in a digital world. Not only is digital access accessible at home, but it’s at school as well now. Which I have my own beliefs on that type of stuff. But

[00:17:19] Sandie Morgan: Mm-hmm.

[00:17:20] Martha Trujillo: because of kids living in a digital world, their mind capacity to understand things is at a higher level. I think that the age range should be from nine to 14. We should start early prevention then. And it doesn’t have to be straight up like, “Okay, you guys, this is commercial sexual…” Using those terms, because they might feel a little uncomfortable. They may know certain things, but my kid does not like to — if I’m watching a movie, I gotta be very careful about what I’m watching, because if he sees even kissing, he starts feeling like, “That’s cooties.”

[00:17:55] I’m like, “But that’s good, right?” That means he hasn’t been exposed to things that are harmful. But I don’t want my kid living under a rock either. I need him to be careful about certain things and everywhere he goes. So early prevention needs to be spoken about in a manner that’s appropriate for their age, but also not to be scared to talk to them about it.

[00:18:19] And not thinking that it’s only for certain kids that live in poverty-stricken environments. No, it has to be all around because I did a presentation for a Catholic church. Mind you, I thought this was gonna be a very hard conversation to have with these communion kids — they were so open in La Habra. And the people were so open to it, and it was amazing. The kids were so receptive. They let me speak exactly what it was. The beautiful thing about that, and that I loved, and I’m so glad that I was able to do that, is because I grew up Catholic, and when I was going through my first communion and my confirmation, I was already getting trafficked.

[00:19:15] Sandie Morgan: Oh.

[00:19:16] Martha Trujillo: My connection with God going through these classes with the people at the time was horrible because I’m already there thinking I’m condemned to hell. Clearly, I’ve already done every sin in the book. Going to hell. So I remember going to these classes, and they’re talking about that, and they’re putting these graphic videos of abortion, and I’m just like — I had already gone through something like that because of the sexual activity with older people that I was encountering at that time.

[00:19:49] So I’m already thinking, “There’s no way I’m able to confess to this priest of what I’m doing. How do I get help?” Being able to have done that presentation for those kids and prevent them or give them that awareness — you should have seen the love from not just the staff of that church, but from the kids, the respect. It made me recognize and believe that, you know what? I’m in the right place, and all that I went through was for a reason, and I’m able to share this story. I was able to connect that with them and show them my picture when I was doing my confirmation and how innocent I looked.

[00:20:33] But deep inside, I was going through a living hell because I was going through trafficking.

[00:20:38] Sandie Morgan: Wow. So the name of your organization, Full Circle — that’s definitely full circle.

[00:20:48] Martha Trujillo: Yeah.

[00:20:49] Sandie Morgan: You’re so kind to share such personal memories, but it’s very meaningful, and I appreciate it so much. I think it probably influences the way you do mentorship.

[00:21:07] Martha Trujillo: Mm-hmm.

[00:21:08] Sandie Morgan: Talk about how mentorship factors into your work?

[00:21:15] Martha Trujillo: Mentorship is a big component. The three pillars that I have are community, mentorship, and education. Mentorship being a strong one, because if young kids don’t have a good mentor in their life that can support them through what they’re going through at the moment — and a mentor has to be appropriate for that person at that time.

[00:21:43] I feel like lived experience does have a lot to play with that, but everybody has a certain lived experience with how they’ve lived. I sometimes take a very controversial take on lived experience because when I train people, I say, “Lived experience. You have lived experience. You have lived experience.” But we often don’t know how to build rapport with kids because they’re trained by agencies to say, “Don’t share too much personal information. Don’t share too much, that you’re crossing boundaries.” There’s a level of boundaries we have to still stick to, don’t get me wrong.

[00:22:19] But if someone has encountered something when they were young that they can relate to a young person, that’s something they can teach them — a teachable moment. Remind them that we’re not just adults trying to impose rules on them. We have, at one point, overcome a lot of things ourselves when we were young, and we use that as a technique and a tool to guide them and build that connective rapport with them. They need something to relate to, and if they don’t have something to relate to, they’re not going to be able to connect with you.

[00:22:52] Sandie Morgan: So you’re pointing at me and saying, “You have lived experience,” and you’re pointing over there, “You have lived experience.” How do the people in the room respond to that?

[00:23:05] Martha Trujillo: They respond very well. I’ve done a training for CASA of OC, where they mentor kids. They have foster kids — or they have dual status kids, but mainly foster youth, within the system. Sometimes they have dual status youth that they don’t know how to manage because they’re either gang affiliated, as typically often happens, or incarcerated.

[00:23:34] So it’s a lot more to handle, I would say. Not chaotic, but more to handle for our youth. But

[00:23:40] Sandie Morgan: To handle. That’s so kind.

[00:23:42] Martha Trujillo: Yeah. They ask questions. I’m very open sharing certain things, but I try to say that because I wish that the people that I had immediately when I was a kid were able to share certain things and not just impose rules.

[00:24:02] I didn’t need an ex veterana chola all the time to be like, “Hey, dude, I got through this and you can do it.” It’s okay to just share, “You know what? I made it out of a certain lifestyle. You can make it out.” And that person can be so much different than me. I say that because there were not many people representative of me that made it out of the streets.

[00:24:28] When I say me, I’m not pointing to me as a Mexican female person. I’m just saying someone that just made it out of the damn streets that can tell me a good experience of how they made it out and connect with me. But it was like pulling teeth sometimes. I was always asking questions like, “How were you when you were a kid?”

[00:24:46] And they’re just, “Whoa, don’t ask me those questions.” I’m like, “All right. My bad.” I just wanted to know — how did you get to where you’re at? Because I know that everybody has a story, and I was just always curious. I was always just curious about that story.

[00:24:58] Sandie Morgan: How did you get to where you are?

[00:25:02] Martha Trujillo: Yeah.

[00:25:03] Sandie Morgan: That’s a great question. I’m gonna write it down and start using it. Obviously, you have told us how you got to where you are now, and that inspires us. It also challenges us to use our own experiences and not just tell somebody else’s story.

[00:25:26] Martha Trujillo: Yeah.

[00:25:26] Sandie Morgan: But our kids are facing systemic barriers,

[00:25:32] Martha Trujillo: Mm-hmm.

[00:25:33] Sandie Morgan: they already — these are kids who already have some kind of risk. The whole issue around dual status kids — I remember first learning that phrase. That meant they were in our child welfare system because they weren’t in a safe environment, so we may have put them in foster care. But now because they’ve interacted with law enforcement in some kind of justice issue, now they’re on probation, they’re in juvenile detention.

[00:26:12] One of the key things for me about that dual status is they didn’t move from child welfare. We care about making sure you become a healthy adult. They just had to add on an extra bucket of resources as a dual status kid. Now, our juvenile justice system is designed to rehabilitate. It’s designed to restore justice, to make things right.

[00:26:50] You’ve pushed my buttons, Martha. Dual status is not a bad label. We still see you as a child,

[00:27:01] Martha Trujillo: Yeah.

[00:27:02] Sandie Morgan: we are here to help you get on the right path. And our juvenile justice system has a lot more resources to better support them. Okay, I’m gonna quit preaching.

[00:27:20] Martha Trujillo: No, you’re doing good.

[00:27:22] Sandie Morgan: Yeah, and I wanna look ahead at what are your hopes, your goals for Full Circle? And really, how do you include your community of educators, advocates, policymakers, people like me? Every time I have a conversation with you, I take away something I can use in the work in our community. But what are your hopes?

[00:27:53] Martha Trujillo: My hopes are to continue trying to get up to the table, get in any room that I can and share my experiences and my academic expertise. I’m currently waiting to get into a PhD program at UC Irvine

[00:28:12] Sandie Morgan: Ah.

[00:28:13] Martha Trujillo: in education. I do have hopes of opening up my own school, alternative education learning center that I can apply everything I’ve learned and have a system that can support youth that are typically non-traditional. Right now I’m working super hard in getting into different conferences to be a speaker. I just came back from Texas doing a gang intelligence conference out there. Super well-received. They loved it. I always get good feedback because, not just because I’m sometimes super funny, but also because I hit everything and the mark was very relatable. I don’t water myself down, Dr. Sandie. There’s something that I have, and everything that I’ve gone through, but also just the person that I am inside that was never taken from me. At one point it was taken from me. I was able to restore it, and I don’t wanna lose it ever again. To be able to be me and be Martha and share this passion that I have to support kids and open up sometimes controversial discussions on things, and show how we need to better identify youth early on, especially if they are involved with systems that we typically right away say, “Oh, well, that’s a bad kid.”

[00:29:35] I’m like, “That’s not a bad kid. That’s a youth that needs support.” So just looking in with a different lens, different perspectives, and challenging that perspective for sure. But just have hopes of continuing to do what I’m doing and reaching bigger audiences. I do think that doing the local work here in my community brings such comfort to me, because I feel like I made it and I dipped out of Orange County and I lived somewhere else. There’s something within me that’s telling me, “Don’t let those kids not make it out or not see the way that you’re seeing things now.”

[00:30:17] I have this testimony to tell them, “Young girls and young boys, going through these challenges that sometimes you think they’re self-inflicted, they’re not, but please ask for support. There’s a way out. There’s a way to ask for help.

[00:30:37] There’s a way to seek basic needs that you need without having to put yourself in situations that are gonna be harmful to you, even though you think that you’re causing the harm and you’re not.” I think more families need help. I don’t think there are always bad families. Sometimes people are just trying to survive, and in that survival, sometimes kids are left unsupervised, and parents are just trying to make it. It sucks. Sometimes kids feel neglected, and they hold that against their parents. Now as a parent myself, I look at my mom, I’m like, “I’m so sorry for having to put you through all that.” But also I tell her, “But you hurt me as well by having done that to yourself.” Healing is a process, and I’m 31 and we’re still trying to repair that, but I get it. I get it now, and why now I hover over my son, but I still give him his space. My hopes is just for every child to be able to have a childhood that’s worthwhile. I just want to see more happy faces of kids, and I don’t wanna see kids in detention centers or families that are ripped apart. I know it’s difficult, and I just think that as a community, the County is doing so good. Our events like Know More, Do Better — if I had that, Sandie, when I was a kid, that would’ve been amazing.

[00:32:14] Sandie Morgan: Well, we’re going to make sure we put a link to that in the show notes for this episode. I want to land on my appreciation and admiration for you. 31 years old, you have a bachelor’s in criminal justice from Cal State University. You have a master’s in criminology from UC Irvine. I did not have those kinds of accomplishments by the time I was your age.

[00:32:55] I did have an associate degree in nursing, but I do want people to hear in this interview your high value for the academic path you have pursued, and you have combined

[00:33:12] Martha Trujillo: I wanna —

[00:33:13] Sandie Morgan: the academic and the lived experience, and you are a unicorn. You’re a unique advocate, and we are grateful for you being part of our community and our efforts to do prevention right here in our schools.

[00:33:33] Martha Trujillo: A shout-out to my district, the Fullerton School District, and specifically Ms. Rosanna Fonseca. She goes to the Know More, Do Better all the time. And Ms. Ruthie, obviously, because Ms. Ruthie gave me the opportunity of a lifetime, and she helped me connect. She gave me the time, and it’s crazy to think and look back, and it is all full circle. When I was kicked out — well, expelled — from Nicolas Junior High, in the Fullerton School District, I was expelled right after I got out of foster care. Two weeks into the school, in eighth grade, expelled for bringing drugs on campus.

[00:34:15] Okay. But the beautiful part is that in 2024, I believe — I’m not getting my dates wrong, Ms. Rosanna — I had done an assembly speech for Ladera Vista in Fullerton, and for the kids that were getting in fights and stuff like that. After that, she calls me and she’s like, “Martha, how would you like to promote with the eighth graders from Nicolas Junior High?” And I was like, “Oh my God.” That’s when I said it’s full circle. That was

[00:34:48] Sandie Morgan: Ah.

[00:34:48] Martha Trujillo: the last thing I needed, and I got my Nicolas promotion certificate from the principal with the kids. It’s honoring me.

[00:34:58] Sandie Morgan: Oh —

[00:35:06] Martha Trujillo: A quick blurb about where I was at and being here today and what that meant. I just felt so loved in that moment to be able to do that, and that’s when everything just tied back. From getting expelled there, I got every other educational certificate, but that was the missing one.

[00:35:27] Sandie Morgan: Oh my goodness. So that’s a —

[00:35:30] Martha Trujillo: Full circle.

[00:35:31] Sandie Morgan: Oh, Martha, that’s a wonderful way to end today’s conversation. Thank you so much for sharing your lived experience, your academic knowledge, and your heart and passion to serve. Thank you.

[00:35:48] Martha Trujillo: Thank you so much.

[00:35:50] Delaney: Thank you to Martha Trujillo for reminding us that prevention can begin with something as simple and as powerful as connection. Her feeding before teaching approach shows us that trust, care, and practical support can open the doors for real mentorship. Listeners, if you loved this conversation, make sure to check out our website at endinghumantrafficking.org for tons of in-depth show notes and other resources.

[00:36:15] If you’d like to help us grow this podcast, you can start by sharing this episode with someone and connecting with us on Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. And as always, thanks for listening.