381: Why Hope Belongs in Every Anti-Trafficking Organization’s Toolkit

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.

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

Transcript

[00:00:00] Annalisa Enrile: I think I would like to leave people with the idea that hope is more than a feeling, and that these other feelings that we also have can become operationalized. So we can operationalize something like hope.

We can operationalize love. We can operationalize faith. We can operationalize all of these things that we want for ourselves, and for our communities, and turn them into what we are doing and not just what we want people to feel or have.

[00:00:38] Sandie Morgan: Traffickers recruit by selling hope. Annalisa Enrile wants advocates to take it back. She says hope is more than a feeling. Whether you’re a survivor leader, a social worker, a student, or someone who wants to support the movement, her three steps can help you operationalize hope in the fight against human trafficking.

Hi, I’m Sandie Morgan, and this is the Ending Human Trafficking Podcast. Today, I’m talking with my friend, Dr. Annalisa Enrile, a teaching professor at the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work.

Her anti-trafficking work began in the Philippines, and today she uses design thinking to build prevention programs and interventions that turn hope into action. And now, here’s our conversation.

[00:01:47] Sandie Morgan: Dr. Annalisa Enrile, I am so happy to welcome you to our podcast.

[00:01:55] Annalisa Enrile: Thank you so much. I’m so happy to be here.

[00:01:58] Sandie Morgan: We were together last month at the Amplify gathering, and you inspired our community to think about hope differently. Think about it as a verb. And I’m curious what you expected us to do differently the next day.

[00:02:23] Annalisa Enrile: I think that one of the things that I’ve been really looking at in terms of our work is how daunting it seems, and if people could change and shift their frame of mind the next day as to how we look at that work so that it’s more hope-centered, but centered in a way where hope, as you said, is a verb.

That’s the challenge. How do we operationalize that hope so that we are leading not with this kind of false optimism, but really where we’re saying, “Okay, we have these tools at our disposal. We know what we want to do, and we have the right people and can bring the right people around us,” so that the way, not just that we face the problem, but the way that we push through with it, the way that we work, the way that we coalition, is with hope at the possibilities, and also seeing how many more opportunities there are when we are not operating always in crisis, when we’re not always having to defend or really fight through what we’re doing.

It’s just a time now where there’s so much struggle that the way we work has to change, I believe.

[00:03:51] Sandie Morgan: Wow. Well, okay, so you used the word operationalize, and I’m also a professor, and I love teaching freshmen. And when I introduce this concept of operationalizing something that may have been a concept they grow up with but have never actually determined what it can break down into, I realize that because we use this podcast in our classrooms, I need to stop and actually understand what are the elements of operationalizing something.

[00:04:33] Annalisa Enrile: I think the biggest element of operationalizing something, when I work with my students as well, is just to start with this very simple idea of how do we make something like hope, which is very ambiguous (it’s hard to hold a feeling), concrete and tangible, so that they can say, “Okay, this is something that we are using to do other things,” right?

In this sense, we are going to use hope now to do our anti-trafficking work, to do our social impact work, and we’re going to do so by creating measurements around the work that we’re doing, by creating a journey or a pathway to how we’re going to get there, and then by being very, very intentional afterwards about how we do that work and who we bring into that space to do it.

I think that oftentimes when we are in crisis mode, or when we have even false urgencies, we are just operating from our gut, which is okay, which we do a lot of. But when we can take a moment to really map out that pathway, it’s not just stronger, but the process is better for everyone involved, especially because the people that are doing work like this, this isn’t the only thing that we’re doing.

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed also by the amount of challenge that’s out there. When you talk about trafficking, I always see it in people’s eyes. They just begin to shut down, glaze over, not ’cause they are not interested, but they just don’t know where to start.

[00:06:23] Sandie Morgan: So when you used the term metrics, that lights me up because I grew up in leadership roles where I was constantly told, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” And we often spend our time when we’re talking, especially about social justice issues, trying to inspire people and move them towards action, and it’s very aspirational, but it’s also very nebulous, and they don’t know where to step, what to do next.

But that metric piece means that there’s something that we can touch and report on. What is something that I could measure when I’m operationalizing hope?

[00:07:22] Annalisa Enrile: I think it depends. And going back to that ambiguity, we have to create new measurements, ’cause I think that sometimes we’re measuring the wrong things for the sake of measuring. I always go back to one of my first programs in the anti-trafficking space, which was a program for girls, and I just remember all of the amazing things that we were doing, and the funder wanted us to report on their GPA, and it confused me.

I was like, “What does this have to do with academics?” If this program is working, does not necessarily mean that they are getting better grades. That’s not our goal here. And so I think that as a community of providers and of advocates and activists, we have to also train our supporters, including our funders, as to what metrics we’re really looking at.

And so I think that when we operationalize hope, we’re also saying not just this is the pathway to a very defined goal, but this is how we know when that goal has been achieved. This is what success looks like. And then however you define this is what success looks like, that’s when we can know this is how we measure that success.

If we could picture what that success looks like, then we can create measurements from that picture that we’ve created. And I know that… Sorry, I know that also sounds ambiguous, but I’m trying to give

[00:08:54] Sandie Morgan: No, it’s really leading me to another aspect of hope, because I know and you know, and you’ve written about it, traffickers use hope to recruit and fraudulently engage victims, and they paint that picture of what success looks like. Can you talk about how traffickers use hope?

[00:09:26] Annalisa Enrile: Yeah, they paint this picture of, especially when we look at domestic trafficking, and even of course to some extent international trafficking as well, we really look at traffickers that are promising a, quote-unquote, “better life.” And one of the ways, and I’ve learned this conversation actually from a survivor, she shared that when she works with girls that are being groomed especially, right?

‘Cause you wanna try to find that sweet spot so that you can find out if they’re being groomed so that they don’t get trafficked. She questions and throws that kind of metric question to youth and says, “Okay, what does that mean, a better life?

Tell me what that means. Concretely, where are you living? What are you doing? Supposedly, these means that this pimp or trafficker is going to give you, what is that going to get you?” And oftentimes this kind of grooming works because their world is this big, and by questioning, again, using hope, “Is this what you’re hoping for?

This?” Whatever it is, it’s not the big world, right? So to be able to show them how much bigger the world is than even this picture that this pimp is painting, which is crumbs compared to the world, is one way that this survivor shared with me that she combats some of that false hope that pimps and traffickers are painting, because we all know no matter what is promised, the bottom line is what is taken, and the

[00:11:24] Sandie Morgan: Oh.

[00:11:25] Annalisa Enrile: That can’t compare.

And we’re also talking, right, in a previous conversation, Sandie, about empowerment, and I think that the role of taking back hope and making it something that is in our arsenal of tools is something that, I think, for anti-traffickers and for advocates, activists, is so powerful for us.

[00:11:54] Sandie Morgan: I remember during our conversation with our Amplify gathering, you offered three steps to operationalizing hope, and one of the guests, who happens to be a pastor sitting in one of the front tables, got so excited, and he’s looking for a pen to write it down. I’m sure his congregation is gonna hear about that.

I want everybody to hear those three steps. Let’s start with step one.

[00:12:29] Annalisa Enrile: So step one is having a very clear goal. And the work that I do in social work is really looking at how do we use things like design thinking in our work to create programs, interventions, prevention programs, et cetera. And the first place that we start is having a clear goal. Another way to think about that is knowing the problem that we’re solving.

So being very precise about what is the challenge that is in front of us, what is it that we are trying to solve for? Something like trafficking is so intersectional with other wicked problems in the world, with so many root causes, that I think causes the overwhelm. So if we can clarify this is the problem that we’re solving now, this is our goal, that can help us then get to step two, which is then to define what is our pathway.

So what are the different ways… One of my favorite, not to be the nerdy professor, but one of my favorite systems terms is equifinality, which means there’s many

[00:13:37] Sandie Morgan: Wait, say that again.

[00:13:39] Annalisa Enrile: Equifinality. That’s the word. I love it. And it means many pathways to get to the same goal. So that’s also, I think…

Yes.

[00:13:52] Sandie Morgan: You’re blowing my mind here, because so many of us, and I’m a firstborn daughter, so I’m confessing, I wanna fix it, and I have a pathway, and I’m going to give it to you. So that isn’t hope-centered design, is it?

[00:14:12] Annalisa Enrile: Well, it’s a deterministic design, ’cause it… Yeah. But that idea of there’s many pathways, I think, is part of how we operationalize hope, because the part of hope, as a feeling, is that there’s always a way. And what we’re saying now when we operationalize it is we’re saying, “Yes, there is a way, but you need to identify those paths.”

And depending on what that problem is that you’ve already looked at and have defined, there could be several different ways to reach that goal, but intentionally, we’re going to pick the journey that we’re taking. We are going to map out what that pathway looks like, and I think that is very, very crucial to that kind of feeling of hope, because that also, going back to what we were talking about earlier, will help us understand what are the guideposts that show us we’re going the right direction?

In other words, what are those metrics that let us know, yeah, this is the path that we’re taking, and it’s the right path that we’ve chosen?

[00:15:24] Sandie Morgan: It makes me think of driving, and I love seeing the little blue dot moving, and I’m getting closer and closer to my daughter’s house. So I can see my progress. Okay, that’s step one and step two, right? So step three.

[00:15:42] Annalisa Enrile: Step three is our own agency. So it’s cultivating agency of ourselves and the people that we bring together to help us. And so what that might look like is capacity building, it may be awareness raising, it may be trainings, it may be coalition building, but it’s really creating that agency in parallel with those other two steps so that when the opportunity arises, we are ready.

We know who to call, we have the map. The car is either charged or gassed up, and we’re ready to go. And that, I think, really speaks to a strength of the anti-trafficking movement: even when we have felt the most overwhelmed, we don’t stop preparing.

And I think that’s also something that, logistically speaking, funders need to pay attention to. Even when there is no emergency, organizations need to be supported because the work doesn’t end just because there’s not a group of people to service right away.

Everything is always in preparation, in debriefing, in various stages of the cycle, and if we don’t keep that going, when opportunities come, either opportunities to help or opportunities to transform, and we’re not ready, that’s then an opportunity lost.

[00:17:20] Sandie Morgan: Okay. So that makes a lot of sense to me, but if I am a survivor leader, small nonprofit, and I’m trying to explain to my funder, to the philanthropy organization in my community, what you just said, how can you break that down into a conversation, a dialogue that centers the hope and the pathways?

[00:17:53] Annalisa Enrile: That’s such a great question. As you were talking, one of the things that first came to mind to me is that a lot of people actually don’t understand, since we were talking about pathways, the pathway that survivors take. And so I think first, it’s really understanding what does it mean to be a survivor leader, because I think that’s a dual role.

You are both becoming a leader in the space, but you are also dealing with your own healing and trauma and personal, right? Your own personal journey. And so I think part of that is educating people, including funders, about what that looks like. And so even more so, that idea of preparation, or that idea of a cycle of constantly increasing capacity, being kind to yourself, healing, all of those types of things that are happening in the background, have to be understood in context.

So I think these very human discussions can be had about the organization, but about the people that are running that organization, especially if they’re small nonprofits. What does it mean, and why that support is needed. I think we’ve been placed in situations where we are constantly having to rationalize and prove that what we’re doing is correct, that it’s very difficult to say, “I need this because we’re going to have hard times.”

We have to build capacity because when we hit that hard time, we’re not always gonna be operating at full tilt. And if you are constantly having to prove yourself, it’s just not a space where you can grow, because you’re constantly doing X, whatever that is.

Trying to get money, defending that money, trying to gather resources, trying to gather people to your cause. There has to be a space that we now have to create ourselves, I think, where we can exhale a little bit, where we can reflect. That’s the only way we get better also.

[00:20:21] Sandie Morgan: Well, you and I have lived in this space for a long time, and we have been in scarcity mode. All of us fall into that at some point. So this capacity-building part of a hope-centered design is really relevant for those who have been doing this a long time and those just starting, for them to understand what they’re going to face.

And when I think about capacity building and your concern that people will become discouraged, which is kind of the opposite of hope because their charge dies, they run out of gas, and that capacity building, instead of just being for this one trip, it’s like carrying around an extra charger for your phone because you’re not going to have a place to connect.

How do we frame that and put that in the budget when we’re submitting a proposal?

There’s no place…

[00:21:48] Annalisa Enrile: I know.

[00:21:50] Sandie Morgan: …the grant form.

[00:21:51] Annalisa Enrile: I know, I know. And I think actually, Sandie, that’s the problem. There’s no place on the grant form. And so, like you said, we’ve been doing this for so long, and I’ve spent many years thinking about how do we articulate that? How do we… And if you asked me even five years ago, I would’ve said something like, “I think it’s a conversation.

I think it’s getting people together and maybe coming up with new ways to fit this into the actual intervention piece or the program.” But now, I think you have it right. We have to rewrite the application. I think we’re at a space where the people that have been doing this work, we know the terrain, we know what is happening, and even to some extent, what could and will happen.

And so it’s time to bring our other partners in, or it’s time for our other partners to also begin to see the reality that we have to build capacity, that we have to honor coalition so that people are not operating on the scarcity mindset. And even the common notions of the alliances that we do have, almost all the alliances I could think of require a governing body or a central lead organization.

Even though you’re bringing people together, you’re still saying there’s a top spot. So that kind of scarcity is still built in. I think one of the most powerful things about hope-centered movements, not even just hope-centered design, but hope-centered movements, is that we are operating from the beginning with the assumption that there is enough and there is a way, which we don’t have now.

[00:23:47] Sandie Morgan: There is enough and there is a way. Wow. And when we’re thinking about capacity building in terms of there is enough, I think that creates space for some creativity so that we don’t actually buy everything. Everything doesn’t have a dollar amount or a yen or a euro.

But people are an amazing resource. And when I think about hope along my way, I am constantly considering people I’ve met that have poured into me, that have recharged me, like my conversation with you last month. We scheduled… I’m telling on us, because we set up a 45-minute call, and 90 minutes later it’s like, “I have to go. I’m gonna be late,” because it does fuel our hope when we have time together, and we do find new ways to have enough to share resources.

[00:25:19] Annalisa Enrile: Yes. It just makes me smile, and it’s just so timely, because in other circles I’ve been thinking a lot about an elder in the Filipino community, who’s since passed, but was a strong mentor of mine, Uncle Roy Morales. And Uncle Roy used to say, “Stop thinking about just money.

It’s not about…” He used to say, “It’s not just about treasure. It’s also the people that you meet and you connect with along the way,” because it’s really, at the end of the day, when we talk about what social movements are successful, is about talent and time, and people being generous with their talents, people being generous with their time, their commitment.

And I’ve seen that, and I’m sure you have, too. In so much of our work, of course we need the material resources, but what really gets us across that finish line or down that path, to use the same metaphor, is people’s experiences, their stories, their willingness, and that they would have… That’s kind of…

I hate to say that’s irrelevant of the budget or not. Nobody’s saying, “How much is this?” even though we need it. I’m not saying we don’t need it, but that other piece is invaluable.

[00:26:55] Sandie Morgan: And you just used an illustration of capacity building that we often overlook. This elder in the Philippines poured into you as a mentor. How would you frame mentoring as part of how you have grown in your own practice, and how that moves you towards a hope goal that you’ve set for yourself?

Because you’ve already identified, we’ve been in this movement, and people ask me, I was with a group of people just day before yesterday, and they’re like, “How do you keep doing this?” Because there’s thousands more reported yesterday. And it is because I have people like you pouring into me.

Talk about mentorship as capacity building.

[00:28:00] Annalisa Enrile: I think it’s the ultimate capacity builder. I 100% would not have engaged in this work at all, much less stayed in it, without the types of mentors that I’ve had. I think in a very real way… And I also think about mentors in a very broad way. A lot of people think mentors always have to be older or in a higher position than you.

And I always think, one, some of my best mentors are kids. I learn the best lessons from my 17-year-old niece. Some of our best mentors are our peers, right? Because we’re all in it together, and we are learning from each other. And then of course, the people that have had those experiences before us, that have led the way.

I work with a kind of peer mentor, and he said the funniest thing to me when I was talking about hope and even starting to have these conversations. I said, “Am I crazy? Or, I mean, is this something?” And he said, “Yeah. People need to know if that light at the end of the tunnel is the goal that you’ve been reaching for, or if it’s a train that’s coming at you.”

And I thought that was so perfect, because I think that’s actually the role of our mentors that are older and that do have this experience. They can tell us, “No, no, no, no, you gotta move out of the way. That’s not what that looks like.” And I think that…

Or, “No, keep going.” Like you said, those signposts. I think it’s just the time really that people will spend to you to properly mentor, right? Having these conversations, having people share their experiences. That is an abundance, right, of sorts, that generosity of spirit. Yeah.

[00:30:10] Sandie Morgan: Wow. We’re definitely going to have more conversations. You’re coming to Ensure Justice in March, but is there one thing you really wanted to leave with listeners today?

[00:30:24] Annalisa Enrile: Ooh. Well, that’s a hard one, Sandie, because there’s so much, as you always know. I think I would like to leave people with the idea that hope is more than a feeling, and that these other feelings that we also have can become operationalized. So we can operationalize something like hope.

[00:31:07] Sandie Morgan: So my three steps: I’m setting a goal, I’m developing a pathway, and then I’m measuring my progress in getting there. Those are my three steps.

Do you need to correct me a little?

[00:31:25] Annalisa Enrile: I think you are measuring things, but the third step is really you’re cultivating that agency, and that measurement is part of it. Yeah.

[00:31:35] Sandie Morgan: Okay. Cultivating my agency. So that really means it’s kind of like when I’m teaching my kids to ride a bicycle, at some point I’m letting go

[00:31:48] Annalisa Enrile: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:31:51] Sandie Morgan: and they take off, and that is what agency looks like. You’re not right there hanging on. And as we build hope in the folks that we work with, that we serve, we’re going to turn back to the articles you’ve written.

We’ll put links in the show notes. We’ll share this podcast, and we will invite all of you listeners, YouTubers, to come and join us at Ensure Justice in March. Thank you so much.

I feel like I’m inspired for the whole day.

[00:32:31] Annalisa Enrile: Oh my gosh. Likewise, every time I talk to you. And I’m so excited about Ensure Justice. I can’t wait for this conversation to keep going.

[00:32:40] Sandie Morgan: Annalisa, thank you for reminding us that hope is more than a feeling. Your three steps give us a place to start. Set a clear goal, map the path, and build agency to be ready when the opportunity comes.

Listeners, if you enjoyed this conversation, make sure you check out our website at endinghumantrafficking.org. We’ve got tons of in-depth show notes and other resources. If you’d love 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, thank you for listening.