Hi, everyone. My name is Faith Huckel, and I'm the Executive Director of Restore NYC. Gizmodo commenter @92BuickLeSabre raised several questions about Restore in the comment section of a Gizmodo article supporting Hello Rewind. I would like to take the time to respond since I have been working on Restore since its inception. The comments, and my responses are below: Restore NYC has way too little information on their own site - no names of staff, no names of the board of directors, no description of the work that they have done. It's a relatively new organization (also a concern), but not new enough to explain the lack of info.
The idea for Restore began in 2004 with 3 friends sitting around a kitchen table in Washington Heights, trying to brainstorm ideas of how to help survivors of sex trafficking in NYC. The idea grew, little by little, and by 2008, I had left my job, took the plunge, and started working for Restore full time on a part time salary. I lived off of cottage cheese and apples for months.
By February 2009, we had raised enough funds to hire a full time Korean speaking social worker and in March we began working with our first client. Today we have 33 women in our program all from Korea (North and South) and China. Our staff consists of a full-time Executive Director, (me - Faith Huckel), a program manager, a Chinese-speaking Social Worker, and an intern. We have a board of ten people that are dedicated experts in this field. Our clients ages range from 21 to 38 years old. Our vision is to provide a long term safe house which remains the number one need for this population in the city right now, in addition to job opportunities. All of the services that we provide are non-residential until we can raise enough support to open a safe house. The services provided are: counseling, case management, medical advocacy, liaison with legal services and criminal justice process, mentoring program and movement therapy (yoga, dance and art therapy).
Due to the confidentiality and safety issues surrounding this work, other than myself (Faith Huckel), our staff, board and clients remain anonymous, which is why you will not find any photographs on our website. In addition, we are just now working on making our website a bit more savvy, so you should see some improvements soon.
In addition, Restore is a member the New York City Mayor's Anti-Human Trafficking Task Force which meets quarterly, as well as participating members of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women in NYC (CATW):
http://www.catwinternational.org/
Faith Huckel
Executive Director, Restore
