Anderson Alum’s Company Helps Human Trafficking Victims

Anderson School of Management MBA alumnus Carissa Phelps is helping victims of human trafficking with the skills she honed as a UCLA Anderson student. Her company, Runaway Girl, works with victims to get them off the street and on a path to healing.

For Phelps, this topic is important and intensely personal and essential for her current work.

Phelps did not publicly discuss her own saga until she was a graduate student at UCLA. Since then, she’s been the subject of an award-winning documentary, Carissa (directed by UCLA Anderson classmate David Sauvage M.B.A. ’07 and viewable at www.davidsauvage.com), and written a memoir, Runaway Girl: Escaping Life on the Streets, One Helping Hand at a Time.

Phelps was a runaway by age 12, escaping a troubled and dangerous home life. She fell under the control of a pimp and began a life of forced sex and drug use, ending up arrested multiple times by age 14. That did it. She began taking steps to rise above the streets.

Encouraged by a youth counselor at juvenile hall and a math teacher, she returned to school after a three-year absence, eventually graduating from high school and Fresno State University, where she earned a B.A. in mathematics, with honors. Then she became a high school math teacher and ultimately made her way to UCLA.

Runaway Girl, a California FPC, or for-profit entity with a “special” or social purpose, creates employment opportunities for former runaways and survivors of human trafficking.

The company hires survivors to work as trainers, consultants and advisers with local and community-based organizations that help victims of human trafficking.

Trainers also work with legal, medical and law enforcement groups to teach them to see the girls and boys they meet not as prostitutes committing a crime, but as victims.

Through Runaway Girl, Phelps restores some control to the victims. The company currently has 24 trainers and experts-in-training, including Rachel Thomas, a survivor who is also an alumni (M.Ed. ’08). Phelps’ organization is predominantly California-based but Runaway Girl collaborates with trainers and organizations across the country.

 

regions: Los Angeles

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