Transforming Survivors into Software Engineers
Earlier this year, the Dressember Foundation launched a survivor scholarship program in partnership with AnnieCannons, an organization with the stated mission of “[t]ransforming survivors of human trafficking and gender-based violence into software engineers.” For the first time this year, AnnieCannons expanded their training program to survivors outside the San Francisco Bay Area through a fully-virtual program. Over the course of the program, trainees will complete training in digital literacy, fundamentals of website development, and web application development to learn front-end software engineering, and access expanded work and career opportunities in tech. Participants from eight states are currently participating in the program, with another cohort slated to launch later this fall.
Morys is the program’s first cisgender, male cohort participant. Morys is also a survivor of sex trafficking. When Morys first heard about AnnieCannons, he was in a residential program for male trafficking survivors, feeling lost and disconnected from family, friends, and the future he had imagined for himself, experiencing financial instability, and suffering devastating health conditions. Though he feels fortunate to have been placed in a program with a compassionate and trauma-informed approach to his trafficking experience, his journey was complex, difficult, and ultimately fulfilling. He said, “It was like homework for staying alive… and I graduated.”
Morys was searching constantly for something that would allow him to lead, in his other words, “A life that would make me untraffickable.” He has been passionate about learning, creating, and having new experiences his whole life. He said, “I want to see everything I can in my lifetime.” This passion and drive to learn and have new experiences made him a perfect candidate for the AnnieCannons program. When he accidentally found the program on Google, he said, “I saw not just a lifeline, but an entire learning environment that would catapult me out of my situation and into the life I wanted for myself.”
Morys said that he has learned a lot about himself through the program. He said, “ I didn't know that I had such a strong work ethic, or that I have great study habits... I won't maybe be a scientist or an engineer one day, I always was one and I'm learning how to be very good at it.” He has found great joy in being part of a community that understands and accepts him. He has also found that peer-based assistance is essential to helping trafficking survivors. He said, “...nobody, NOBODY, knows more about what a survivor needs than a survivor.”
With support from Dressember, AnnieCannons has also expanded to reach at-risk youth aged 18-26 years old through digital literacy training with the Helping Youth People Elevate (HYPE) Center located in San Francisco. The Center, an initiative of Freedom Forward, is intended to help young peoplewho have experienced the foster care or probation system, homelessness, and/or the sex trade to become, as Morys put it, “untraffickable.”
The impact of the Dressember-AnnieCannons partnership is giving people like Morys an opportunity to accomplish things and unlock personal potential not previously believed possible. Morys said, “This is the happiest I have ever been in my entire life. Thanks to AnnieCannons, I don't feel scared or confused about what tomorrow brings. I know in my heart that I'm on a journey that will take me to places I never thought possible. I no longer see barriers, I see ladders and staircases and elevators. I can do anything I want for the rest of my life and nothing is going to stop me.”
About the Author
Miranda Cecil is a spring gal who loves traveling to new places as well as her local frozen yogurt pump. When she's not finishing homework or watering her succulents, she loves to ski, read, and play her rollout piano. Miranda is hoping to turn her passion for human rights and safety into a career as she studies political science and urban planning at the University of North Carolina (Go Heels!)