It all started at Together for Adoption, a conference I spoke at earlier this year. My topic was sex trafficking, and I began to tell the stories of girls trapped in forced prostitution and the “rape-for-profit” business.

At the end of the session, someone spontaneously stood up and said to the 80 people in the room, “If we each gave $30 right now, we could rescue a girl.”  I prayed, and then one at a time people began putting money on the table.

Jennifer and Robert McHaney were one of the couples I met that weekend, and I believe that weekend changed their perspective on the tragedy of sex trafficking in our world.

Sexual slavery is not front page news. The 2 million children who are trapped do not make the covers of our magazines. The local news lead story would almost never focus on trafficked girls in another country.

In other words, at some level in our national media consciousness, we’ve ignored this tragedy.

But the McHaney’s decided they could not ignore this.

They are part of the Change Their Story team, and have set a goal to raise $5,000 this Christmas to help protect girls in Russia from forced prostitution.

Although we started a week ago, they’ve already received $2,125 toward their goal.

They write on their page:

This past October we attended the Together for Adoption Conference where
we learned about the orphans around the world and how we can help.  Our
hearts were particularly broken for the orphans who are lured into or
even violently abducted into the sex trafficking trade because they are
alone and easy targets.  This often happens after they “age-out” of the
orphanages and have no skills or place to turn and are lured into
believing their captors will give them a legitimate job to help give
them a better life.  Instead of the promised job, they are held in
physical and emotional bondage.  Can you imagine the emotional trauma to
these innocent young girls believing they will have a better life and
then having their worlds turned upside down by abuse, rape and other mistreatment?  We couldn’t just sit there and ignore this tragedy any
longer, we were compelled to try to help these young girls rebuild their
lives and the best way we can do that now is to help raise money.  It
takes money to help stop this exploitation and that is how you can
partner with us to make a difference.

If you would like to find out more about how the McHaney’s are working to protect girls from sex trafficking, visit their personal page today.

You too can join Change Their Story. We’ve never done anything quite like this before, but so far we are experiencing great success. This is one of the easiest and most effective tools you can use to advocate for orphans. Just go to this page to sign up. All you have to do is select the area you want to raise money for, choose the amount you want to raise, and use your personal fundraising page to e-mail your friends and family. Join us!