How does HopeNow perform outreach work?

Outreach provides HopeNow with a gateway to reaching possible and identified trafficked people and opens up a two-way path – we reach our target group. Subsequently, more of them reach us.

Trusted within the community

To disrupt human trafficking, the central focus of our outreach work with possible and identified victims is trust building. Trust-building happens over time; seeing outreach as a long-term process is crucial. For a trafficked person to open up and share their story, it can take a long time due to the many layers of trauma involved. Over the past 12 years, HopeNow has built strong relationships based on unique forms of trust, which now form our network.

Through this network, we receive referrals from former clients who recommend HopeNow to people they know. That means we can keep our finger on the pulse of what is happening in an area notorious for being closed and secretive. It increases our ability to conduct research reflecting the hyper-complex, multi-dimensional and ever-changing nature of human trafficking. Although we establish first contact with many individuals through the main outreach activities, we get most referrals through our existing network, which has grown over the years.

Most importantly, during the outreach work (in groups, through one-on-one contact, and word-of-mouth within networks), we build trust, build capacity, impart skills and share knowledge so that the marginalised, stigmatised and often vulnerable and criminalised individuals we work with feel empowered to be able to change their life course for the better.

Culturally informed caseworkers

HopeNow is committed to developing improved methods in social work. Considering the ethnic origins of the target group we work with, when funding has allowed us to, we have employed a peer-group social worker who has personally experienced being trafficked from Africa to Europe. We believe this strategy reduced the socio-cultural distance between our practitioners and the target group.

Together with our human-to-human approach to interaction, we believe this methodological approach greatly facilitates trust building. It results in a greater willingness among the vulnerable groups we work with to open up and share their experiences.

HopeNow has, since being founded in 2007, continued to develop outreach work which includes all genders. A key component of our work is that we remain flexible. We focus on many different areas depending on what is required at a given time. The groups we work with are not stationary but are mobile, often at the traffickers' or madams' will.  HopeNow's outreach workers act as the bridge between the possible or identified trafficked person and support services such as referring to legal or medical assistance.

Three main outreach activities

• Being present in the area around Istedgade and the Central Station in Copenhagen during the night to meet and talk with street workers

• Attending informal activities in spaces that potential new clients frequent

• Visiting the prisons, asylum centres and drop-in centres