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Scholarship

The Jade Richard Scholarship Fund

The Jade Richard Scholarship Fund has been established to honor the legacy of Arizona Survivor Leader Jade Richard who unexpectedly passed earlier this year, only a month after graduating with her bachelor’s degree. This fund will support the education of survivors of human trafficking who are pursuing a higher education, trade school, advanced certificates, or other career readiness programs. Many survivors of human trafficking often do not have education beyond a GED.

Your partnership would help them to begin higher education and/or job-training courses that would help toward self-reliance, becoming economically empowered and obtaining livable employment. The scholarship is designed for those who have experienced the exploitation of human trafficking through the commercial sex industry or through labor trafficking, as defined by the U.S. Federal government*.

The Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) of 2000 is the first comprehensive federal law to address trafficking in persons. The law provides a three-pronged approach that includes prevention, protection, and prosecution. The TVPA was reauthorized through the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA) of 2003, 2005, 2008, 2013, 2017, and 2018.

Under U.S. federal law, “severe forms of trafficking in persons” includes both sex trafficking and labor trafficking:

Sex trafficking is the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, obtaining, patronizing, or soliciting of a person for the purposes of a commercial sex act, in which the commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such an act has not attained 18 years of age (22 USC § 7102). 

Labor trafficking is the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purposes of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery, (22 USC § 7102).