How to Stay Committed to the Fight against Human Trafficking
By Dressember CEO and founder Blythe Hill
At Dressember, we are committed to year-round advocacy. Though the style challenge may be over, the fight to end human trafficking is not. Being an authentic advocate means cultivating practices in your daily life that allow you to stay attentive to injustice and the vulnerability that puts people at risk of experiencing trafficking. This is a lifelong journey and we're here to link arms with you!
This month we’ve talked about five habits of authentic advocacy. We’ve talked about owning your learning process, listening to diverse voices, looking for and supporting intersectional issues, identifying your consumer values, and committing to monthly giving. I also shared last week on our Instagram about ways to avoid burnout. We know this work can be overwhelming, but we also believe there are sustainable ways to stay involved.
Oftentimes, people disengage with Dressember when the month of December is over. I’ll be the first to say, taking breaks can be necessary and good, especially when you hope to stay in this fight for the long haul. I often find myself grateful when our campaign season winds down and I can take a breather; it’s not healthy for most people to be campaigning nonstop.
But what does it look like to advocate year-round sustainably? And why is that important?
Let’s start with why it’s important to stay in this fight. Unfortunately, trafficking as a criminal industry doesn’t have an off-season, and millions of people are at risk of exploitation at any given moment. It can be tempting to pat yourself on the back after a month of great advocacy work, but the needs continue to be urgent and numerous.
The good news is that there are plenty of ways to weave sustainable advocacy into your daily life: get connected to our community of Facebook, join in our off-season events and mini-campaigns, host a birthday fundraiser in lieu of gifts, join the Dressember Collective to become a monthly supporter or, perhaps the most impactful option, make a commitment to shop ethically and fair trade whenever possible. A lot of people also underestimate or overlook the impact we can make when we simply share information and resources with others in our life. When you make someone aware of the reality of human trafficking, and then equip them with ways to take action, you get to take credit for whatever impact they go on to make! So, don’t underestimate the power of simple conversation.
Becoming a life-long authentic advocate is a journey, and likely something that will change over time.
You will find you go through different seasons of life, and those seasons will impact the ways you advocate. They will even impact the reasons you advocate, as I’m finding now as a mother of a young child—I’m finding my heart break in a million new ways for the millions of little ones who get caught in an industry of exploitation every year.
I have long believed that the “secret sauce” of Dressember is how easy and fun it is. For much of my life, the word “advocacy” intimidated me, because it made me think of work, sacrifice, and confrontation. I’ve found that for most people, myself included, advocacy work needs to be fun in order to be sustainable. It might even need to be fun in order to be authentic for most people. When we enjoy the work, our passion shines through, and others are inherently invited into the work as well. All this to say, find and commit to your own baby steps on your journey to sustainable advocacy, and let go of the guilt that there’s always more you could be doing. We all have to find our own rhythms as an advocate. That’s the beauty of Dressember—you can make it your own no matter what season you’re in.