Submitted by: Global Center for Women and Justice Vanguard University
Written by: Sandra Morgan
How do you prove that something did not happen?
That question has followed the Global Center for Women and Justice (GCWJ) at Vanguard University for two decades as we have worked to prevent human trafficking among young people in Orange County.
Intervention produces outcomes we can count: victims served, investigations opened, survivors housed, prosecutions completed. Prevention is different. We cannot responsibly write in a grant report, “This year, we prevented 714 children from being trafficked.”
That would be ridiculous—and impossible to prove.
Yet we have always believed that reaching young people before exploitation matters. We can teach them to recognize unhealthy relationships and grooming, understand online risks, identify protective factors, make safer choices, look out for one another, and know when to ask for help.
So, long before we had significant funding, we started.
In 2006, Vanguard students established Live2Free, a student-led movement committed to fighting human trafficking. By 2007, students were going into Orange County schools and communities to raise awareness and educate other young people. They volunteered their time. Faculty trained them. Community partners opened doors.
In 2008, a small subaward through the Orange County Human Trafficking Task Force helped us hire support. Community organizations and donors came alongside us. Some grants were as small as $5,000. Each contribution kept the work moving.
But the need was growing, and awareness alone was not enough.
Human trafficking was happening here. The Orange County Human Trafficking Task Force’s 2025 Victim Report found that minors represented approximately half of the trafficking victims served, with the average age of an identified minor sex-trafficking victim just 14.
For us, that number reinforces something we learned years ago: prevention cannot begin at 14.
It needs to begin earlier, while young people are learning about relationships, boundaries, social pressures, online spaces, and whom they can trust.
Over time, a community formed around that conviction. GCWJ faculty, students, volunteers, survivors, nonprofits, and Orange County Department of Education prevention leaders contributed expertise and experience. Together, we kept asking: What would it look like to move beyond awareness and build a true prevention model?
In 2018–2019, GCWJ, OCDE, and Project Kinship piloted an intensive peer-to-peer human trafficking education program at a local high school. Instead of Live2Free’s traditional two-hour awareness presentation, students participated in a 12-week curriculum designed to help them identify and avoid situations and people who might exploit them.
The students became part of the prevention strategy. Their capstone projects took what they learned back to peers and community through a short film about avoiding trafficking recruiters, a school mural, and an anti-trafficking assembly. During the pilot, students also disclosed that they knew friends who had been or were currently being trafficked.
We believed we were ready for the next step.
In 2019, we submitted an ambitious three-year grant proposal. The vision was similar to what we are building today: refine the curriculum, reach more schools, evaluate peer-led prevention, strengthen community connections, and develop a model that could be replicated and sustained.
We did not receive the grant.
It was not the only proposal that received little traction.
Perhaps part of the difficulty was the same question we continue to wrestle with today: How do you demonstrate the impact of prevention?
We cannot count the teenager who recognizes controlling behavior and steps away, the student who changes an online behavior, or the young person who later tells a trusted adult that something does not feel right.
But we can measure gains in knowledge and skills, recognition of grooming and unhealthy relationships, protective factors, and changes in attitudes.
Most importantly, we can keep showing up.
And that is what we did.
When grants were declined, faculty, adjuncts, volunteers, students, educators, and community partners continued the work. We refined it. And we wrote again.
Then the Samueli Foundation made a transformational investment.
Their support did not create our belief in prevention. It did something that years of determination and smaller investments alone could not: it gave a long-developed community vision the infrastructure to grow.
Through the Samueli Foundation’s support, Safe Communities; Safe Kids became possible. We could hire dedicated staff, strengthen and update curriculum, intentionally recruit, train, and support Vanguard University students as peer educators, deepen relationships with schools and community partners, and begin investing in the difficult work of measuring prevention outcomes.
In Year 1, Safe Communities; Safe Kids reached 1,284 students in 14 Orange County schools. We trained 26 educators, extending prevention capacity beyond a single classroom presentation, and 10 Vanguard University peer educators completed robust training to engage younger students with practical, age-appropriate prevention education.
These are numbers we can responsibly report.
They do not tell us how many trafficking cases we prevented. Instead, they demonstrate something essential to prevention: young people and the adults around them are being equipped before exploitation occurs.
The Samueli investment is building prevention capacity in Orange County: trained peer educators and educators, school partnerships, curriculum, evaluation, and a growing network capable of carrying prevention beyond a single presentation or grant cycle.
The peer-to-peer model remains central. College students are close enough in age to understand adolescents’ technology, language, relationships, and social pressures while also serving as trusted mentors and role models. As social media, gaming, messaging apps, and digital relationships create new pathways for manipulation and exploitation, prevention must keep learning alongside the young people it serves.
That vision is taking root. In Year 2, we expanded the peer educator team to 20 Vanguard University students and trained 919 young people across 11 schools, youth groups, and after-school clubs. Two new schools, an additional youth group, and three Boys & Girls Club locations extended prevention beyond the traditional classroom. Recognizing that youth safety cannot rest on young people alone, SCSK is also engaging the adults around them through parent presentations, school-health education with the Orange County Department of Education, and outreach in a mental-health setting, helping them recognize risks, respond appropriately, and reinforce a stronger network of safety and support.
In Year 3, the program will reach further into schools, youth groups, Boys & Girls Clubs, and juvenile hall.
And what began in Orange County is beginning to travel. Presentations at statewide prevention conferences in Sacramento and Visalia are sharing what we are learning about peer-led prevention and how the model might be adapted in other California communities.
We do not enter these new spaces claiming that we already know everything that works. Prevention requires humility as well as persistence. We will continue to listen to young people, learn from educators and community partners, evaluate what we are doing, adapt the curriculum, and strengthen our ability to measure meaningful changes in knowledge, skills, and protective factors.
That may be one of the most important things philanthropy has made possible.
The Samueli Foundation did not simply fund more presentations. Its investment gave GCWJ and its Orange County partners the capacity to take an idea sustained for years by students, volunteers, educators, community organizations, and smaller philanthropic investments and begin testing what that idea could become at scale.
Twenty years ago, Vanguard students began carrying a message about human trafficking into Orange County communities. Today, trained Vanguard peer educators are carrying a much more developed prevention curriculum into schools, after-school programs, youth groups, and other community settings.
This story therefore belongs to more than one organization or one grant. It belongs to students who volunteered before there was funding. It belongs to faculty, adjuncts, survivors, educators, volunteers, and community partners who contributed their expertise. It belongs to the organizations and donors whose smaller investments kept the vision alive. It even includes the grants we did not receive, because every proposal required us to clarify and strengthen what we believed prevention could become.
And it belongs to the Samueli Foundation, whose investment allowed years of accumulated community knowledge, relationships, and perseverance to become i
