Dr. Sandie Morgan and Dave Stachowiak are joined by Erin Albright, the former Director of the New Hampshire Human Trafficking Collaborative Task Force. She has over 12 years of experience in the anti-trafficking field and specializes in building organizational capacity and multidisciplinary collaboration through leadership, training, and consultation with service providers, law enforcement, task forces, and lawmakers.  Together they look at building a multidisciplinary collaboration to respond to human trafficking.

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Transcript

Dave [00:00:00] You’re listening to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast. This is episode number 210 – Collaboration: There Will be Challenges.

Production Credits [00:00:08] Produced by Innovate Learning, Maximizing Human Potential.

Dave [00:00:30] Welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast. My name is Dave Stachowiak.

Sandie [00:00:35] And my name is Sandie Morgan.

Dave [00:00:38] And this is the show where we empower you to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference in ending human trafficking. Sandie, a word today that has come up a lot in our conversations over the years, and the word is collaboration. But I think we’re going to dive in a bit further than we have in the past on collaboration.

Sandie [00:00:58] Absolutely.

Dave [00:00:59] I am glad to welcome to the show today, Erin Albright. She is the former director of the New Hampshire Human Trafficking Collaborative Task Force. She has over 12 years of experience in the anti-trafficking field and specializes in building organizational capacity and multidisciplinary collaboration through leadership, training, and consultation with service providers, law enforcement, task forces, and lawmakers. She recently completed a three-year visiting fellowship with the U.S. Department of Justice Office for Victims of Crime, where she focused on improving victim-centered response strategies, developing capacity-building tools and training for labor trafficking, and building multidisciplinary collaboration to respond to human trafficking. Erin, we’re so glad to welcome you to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast.

Erin [00:01:48] Thanks so much. It’s good to be here.

Sandie [00:01:50] Well, and I met you when you were in New Hampshire, and I was out there doing some healthcare provider training, I think. And I have followed you because Derek Marsh was kind of the B.J.A.  Counterpart to your O.V.C. Fellowship Training Task Forces. And so, this idea of collaboration for task forces is very directive in the grant world. So, now human trafficking task force grants are often labeled enhanced collaborative model because we have people from very different sectors with competing agendas. So, you have law enforcement and maybe their big goal is to find the bad guy and put him in jail. And victim services who want to do the very best they can to do a rescue and restoration, and they may be very focused on protecting their client. And so how do you build a collaborative model? I studied quite a bit of William Wilberforce’s efforts to end the trans-Atlantic slave trade. And he talked about overlapping networks and can really inform how we can build better and stronger collaborations by understanding this idea of overlapping networks. It doesn’t mean we all join the same circle and do everything the same way. We still maintain our individual identities and we work to figure out how we can work together to achieve a greater goal. So, that’s kind of my intro to frame this conversation. And I’d love to hear from you, Erin, about the pieces of that process that are significant for you.

Erin [00:03:53] Yes. Well, I had actually never heard of that overlapping network analogy in the past. And I think it’s brilliant. It definitely describes exactly what we’ve recognized to be necessary in the anti-trafficking world. And you’re right that in the grant-funded world, with respect to trafficking, over the past probably decade and a half, folks have really recognized that no one can do it alone. So, this term collaboration keeps popping up and it very much does look like there are overlap networks. And I think for me and the work that I do is about untangling some of those networks where they do overlap with each other and figuring out exactly how they work, why they’re not working, what some of the challenges are. So, you’ll hear a lot of folks talk about, you know, collaboration, it’s heavily dependent on building relationships with other fields. And that’s true. But a lot of the work I do try to dig even deeper into that, where I’m looking at some of the more minutia parts, how are these folks in this group that come from these different worlds, how are they actually interacting with each other? And what are the really subtle problems that maybe nobody’s recognizing because they are coming from these different spaces and sometimes, they need a little bit of help and support to tease out what those issues are because more often than not, they’re not readily apparent. So, that’s a lot of work that I do. And like you said, it’s critical to making the human trafficking task forces work, which in turn are critical to being able to actually identify and support victims and hold perpetrators accountable.

Sandie [00:05:26] So, when I have reviewed this a bit more, I’ve noticed that you emphasized structure. What is it about structure that is so important, especially in leadership?

Erin [00:05:39] Well, I think that there are three really critical elements of building a task force. And like you just said, leadership and structure are two of them, and then I think culture is the third one. But for me, you know, you need a strong leader to be able to navigate all the twists and turns and complication of bringing together these disparate parties who have similar and overlapping interests, but not the exact same interests. But then what that does is then speak to a structure. You need a leader and a team structure that’s going to be supporti...