 Saul Castellanos Saul Castellanos is the President of Freedom Youth Project Foundation, located in San Antonio, Texas. Freedom Youth Project Foundation was founded in 2010 as a human rights organization dedicated to fighting and preventing human trafficking of youth in America primarily through Public Awareness, Prevention and Restoration. Everything Freedom Youth Project Foundation produces and participates in is based on the core belief that childhood should be a wonderful and magical time in life that is filled with learning, exploring and discovering one’s gifts in life. The majority of Saul’s career was spent in the private sector as owner of a software development firm. In that capacity, he served as consultant, business analyst, process engineer, project manager and facilitator. He brings these skill-sets to the development of a non-profit foundation dedicated to America’s youth who are victimized by Human Trafficking. Saul’s leadership has developed Freedom Youth Project Foundation into a collaborative that brings together subject matter experts to address the many challenges pertaining to Human Trafficking. This includes connecting with key leaders from ministries, higher-education, social work, medicine, law enforcement, legislation and policy. Saul is currently participating in the Texas Human Trafficking Prevention Task force, chartered by Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott; the Federal Coalition known as Alamo Area Coalition Against Trafficking. Freedom Youth Project (FYP) Foundation was specifically established to address the critical gaps in services to American youth who are sex-trafficked here in the U.S known as domestic minor sex-trafficking or DMST. FYP has employed a methodology-driven approach to documenting an accurate big-picture perspective on the issue of trafficking of minors in the U.S. A macro perspective provided insight into how trafficking does not exist in “pure-form” but instead has many complex relationships to social ills such as poverty, truancy, runaways, at-risk behaviors and also to crimes such as gangs and drug trafficking. This also provided a strategy for determining where to drill-down to a more granular street-level understanding to this very complex issue. Understanding who is targeted, why they are targeted, how traffickers select, approach and deceive victims provides clarity into where intervention would have the highest impact. From this FYP has developed a 3-tiered mission of Public Awareness, Prevention and Restoration. All of FYP’s initiatives fall into one or more of these three categories. FYP has programs that fall into all these categories, including a Public Awareness campaign called ThinkFreedom Campaign ™ , Prevention training for youth and parents called LiarsAndPosers ™ and others. FYP is has a project management culture for development of tools, training, subject matter expertise and skills designed to be used by other anti-trafficking agencies across the U.S. to further the cause of improving availability and delivery of services to D.M.S.T. victims. |
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