Clan Mother Turtle Lodge Inc.

The Background

Indigenous women, girls, and LGBTQ2S+ persons are at greater risk of being victims of sex trafficking and sexual exploitation, which increases their vulnerability and the likelihood of becoming Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG).

Lived experience leaders are sexual exploitation survivors. There are a growing number of lived experience leaders emerging across Canada wanting to share their experiences with others to prevent exploitation and help those who are currently being exploited and feel that there is no way out.

The Opportunity

A group of lived experience leaders, Indigenous Elders, community members, allies, and funders believed that something tangible could be done to protect the vulnerable and prevent more MMIWG due to sexual abuse, exploitation, and the sex trade. Their vision was to create a powerful online resource for preventing and protecting Indigenous women, girls, and LGBTQ2S+ persons.

Entitled Experiential Voices Project, the group’s goal was to partner with an agency that could build an emotionally powerful digital media site featuring poignant and sometimes raw insights from survivors, as well as Indigenous-led solutions to dismantle sexual exploitation and sex trafficking in Canada.

The digital media website needed to celebrate the stories, knowledge, work, and leadership of persons with lived experiences of sexual exploitation and sex trafficking instead of simply presenting a series of victimization pieces related to sexual exploitation and sex trafficking. The solutions would be grounded in the voices of persons with lived experience in leadership and ancestral-centred Indigenous holistic healing, principles, and knowledge.

The Solution

Relish worked with the Experiential Voices Project members to bring their vision and message to life in an inspirational, educational, and impactful way on an interactive, multi-dimensional digital platform.

The Project’s critical objective was to ensure everyone’s voice was heard. To this end, the website’s home page was designed and built to immediately communicate the inclusion concept. United we stand. Together we rise.  Faces and quotes (voices) float by ethereally, symbolizing that while lived experience leaders are separated geographically, they are connected spiritually as one. Unified in the fight against sexual exploitation and sex trafficking while also providing outlets for healing.  The home page allows visitors to scroll down and browse the site’s rich and abundant content in a compartmentalized yet cohesive and logical manner.

To share voices nationwide, the Relish team developed a powerful interactive map of Canada that presented location information of the lived experiences leaders while at the same time protecting their privacy. Each node on the map uncovers personal stories, experiences, and solutions rooted in experiential leadership. Overall, the content serves as an invaluable resource for front-line workers, legislators, policymakers, and governments across Canada to end sex trafficking and sexual exploitation. It is also being used as an essential public education tool.

The team implemented an inline citation system with easy-to-use CMS for the website’s administrators.