Recently, the US Government's Department of Health and Human Services released a survey of all the research on human trafficking, sex trafficking, and slavery in The United States. It’s a great report and you can read it here. The inescapable conclusion from the report is that there is no consistent and reliable body of research about slavery in the US. We don’t know how many slaves are here, how many are trafficked each year, or where to find them.

I've got to be one of the last people to see Slumdog Millionaire, having only gone to see it this past week. Pretty much everyone I know has seen it, and as you might expect, all my friends know the work we do in human trafficking. I also read almost any blog post or news story that Google can find on trafficking or slavery, so I have a pretty good sense of what is going on. So while I knew that the movie had some trafficking it it, I was really surprised how strongly it was featured in the movie.

An article in the NYT got me thinking about Social Enterprise again. It’s a good article, but further reinforces the confusion about what the term means, and misses one of the single most important factors we all need to know about social enterprises, a factor I wish I knew about before I learned it the hard way.

Its national Human Trafficking Awareness day and a quick google search shows that there are dozens of events around the country. As shown in my previous blog, awareness of slavery is low compared to other causes so I very much hope this national day makes an impact.

If not many people care about slavery, what do we know about those who do care and how can we use that knowledge to expand awareness? There is not a lot of data that can help, but this is the bet we got. The chart below is the last three months of data from YouTube from our most viewed video

With the Jan 11 Human trafficking Awareness Day fast approaching, I thought it might be useful to address the question "what is the awareness level of human trafficking/slavery and how has it been changing". How has the abolition movement been doing? I am aware of no decent surveys that measure, let alone show trends in slavery awareness so I have to look to other tools to try to get a sense on how things are going. Antidotal observations include : there are certainly a lot more non-profits dedicated to abolition, there are lot more books available, and there has been a lot more press. But what about the public? What does the public know and do they care about slavery?

I’m blogging about this because I know I will be frequently using the terms ‘social enterprise’ or 'social entrepreneur' in my blogs and I wanted to be able to define what I am talking about. As someone coming out of the business/financial world I find it a bit strange that I even have to do this, but these terms have been defined and used in so many different ways in the nonprofit world they are almost in danger of losing meaning.

I think that years from now when we look back,  2008 will clearly be the big transition year for TEN.  When we started the year we had had a good 2007 but did not have the capacity to grow much faster. Sarah and I had lost our house and were almost out of savings, and had yet to take a salary, so TEN was understaffed, and underfunded. We were spending a lot of time on day to day chores like shipping and thus did not have enough time to dedicated to growth and planning. At least in the near term, and hopefully for good, those lean times may be behind us.

Well, I had to start blogging sometime. Several times in my life I’ve tried to start a journal or diary, and I’ve never got past a few days before giving up. I think this is because one of the ways I learn the most is from getting into discussions so I seemed to be programmed more to get into arguments (constructive ones mostly) than to want to publish my thoughts. So make this easy on me and comment so I can get a discussion going!

As a context to this blog its probably worth explaining a bit about how we work here at TEN.