Changing 115,000 Lives: This Is What They Learned

Hey, welcome back everybody. It's another episode of the nonprofit show and this is our special global edition where we talk with nonprofit leaders around the world and today is is like a really on the other side of the world. We are welcoming the founder and CEO of Love Justice International, John Molino. Wow. John, tell us where you are. Uh, I'm in South Africa in a place called Bolito, South Africa. >> Amazing. Amazing. Well, we're really excited to be talking with you today. We're going to be talking about how you manage to run your missions across borders, without borders, through borders, and not an easy task. And so, this is going to be something that's just so interesting, and we are delighted that you are with us. We have amazing partners and as our um executive producer Kevin Pace reminded us this morning, today is our 1,599th episode. We will hit our 1,600 uh 600th episode tomorrow, which is a huge milestone for us. Most of our partners have been with us since the very beginning. and they include Bloomerang, American Nonprofit Academy, Staffing Boutique, Your Part-Time Controller, Third Sector Company, JMT Consulting, and Intuitit QuickBooks. These are the folks that really make a difference um in our world and for nonprofits around the world. I'm Julia C. Patrick, CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy. And John Moleno, you are an amazing leader that's really doing a lot of work in this specialized field. um talk to us about Love Justice International and explain to us what your NGO does. >> Yeah, so uh our mission is driving the downfall of slavery by disrupting human trafficking in transit. And so we we uh do that using something called transit monitoring where we have staff who stand in key transit areas. They look for signs of trafficking and and seek to intercept people uh to prevent them from being trafficked. So it's it's a We feel it's the most effective way to fight human trafficking. >> It's riveting because so many people I think in the western developed world don't understand this process and this scourge um that is so pervasive. Um and then your approach which we're going to talk about super interesting. How long have you been doing this work? uh approaching 21 years. >> Wow. Wow. Amazing. Well, congratulations. Well, I love that you have this this long trajectory um throughout a lot of different, you know, changes in society and technology and just how you've been able to grow your organization. And so, it's going to be really interesting to talk to you today, you know, throughout with that lens. So, let's start with that origin story. Um, how is it that you came to decide this was what you were going to do with your energy and over the course of 21 years? I got to believe that your mission focus might have changed or maybe not. >> Yeah. Well, I it it started uh just after college, you know, I was uh trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life and some friends uh I went to Nepal uh with four other friends and we ended up working with street children, had our hearts really broken by by what what we what we learned about them and their situations. And a couple years after that, uh a friend of mine had been involved with starting a children's home in Nepal. And he called me and said, "I want do you want I'm going back to Nepal? home is starting and you know I got a one-way ticket thinking I'd be home by Christmas and I got back I got back to Nepal and I saw on the one hand the street kids we' worked with before you know many had had died or that many had gone from bad to worse it was just like the worst thing ever and on the other hand seeing the kids in this home so full of life singing and dancing going to school being cared for it was like the best thing ever and and that contrast made me feel like this is what I want to do with my life so we started what would become uh Love Justice International. Um and it was it was pretty early on. It was probably about a year and and I would go on to live in Nepal for the next 20 years. And so, uh being uh based in Nepal and being based in the field and and led from the field has certainly shaped our identity quite a lot. Um but early on I started learning about human trafficking and at that time you know they would say that 10,000 uh girls each year from Nepal were trafficked uh into the red light districts of India and these are innocent girls that are recruited by false jobs false marriages. And when they get there and they're told that they're they're being abandoned in a brothel and what they're supposed to do these young girls try to run away or they try to refuse and they can't. They're not allowed to contact anyone they love. They're not allowed to leave. If they do, they'll be hunted down by agents of the brothel. And they're broken in by the most unspeakable uh means imaginable and forced to do, you know, the forced to service as many as 30 clients in a day. And so it was just I I felt my heart breaking when I learned about this and I felt this sense of [clears throat] we have to do something. We have to figure out how to how to fight this. So I started learning about the different different ways of fighting human trafficking and mostly you could divide them into the post-traicking strategies and the pre-traicking strategies and the post-traing strategies like uh like um afterare and rescue um it has a tangible impact and it's incredibly valuable work but of course it would be far better to prevent it from happening in the first place place if possible but the prevention strategies that are usually used is like awareness job creation they don't necessarily have a tangible impact where you can point and say here's a person who would have been trafficked uh um otherwise and so this strategy uh called transit monitoring it had been invented in the early 2000s by several Nepali organizations working along the Nepal India border and we didn't we didn't invent it we just learned about it and uh uh we documented and we figured out how to scale it but it aims for that most strategic moment when a person is in the process of being trafficked uh but before they've been exploited. Um, so we started doing transit monitoring. I can remember the the first the there's a little internet cafe where I would go to check my email and I remember the first email saying we've had our first interception, feeling like that's the most important thing I've ever been a part of. Um, and you know over over the years we would really hone in on and figure out how to scale transit monitoring. And a lot of that was learning about what my role and what our role as, you know, as the foreigners, as outsiders should be >> is mostly find the right people and let them do everything because they're better at it than than we are. And so eventually we would really get that right and figure out how to scale. So now we operate in 18 countries. We've intercepted over 115,000 people uh to prevent them from being trafficked. And it costs us $112 uh to intercept one person. >> Wow. So, let's back up because I'm I'm really curious about um where you were raised and what your educational background was because you may you said something that was really interesting about how shocking this concept was that you didn't really know about it. Um, can you can you share with us how you started as a young man, like how you you entered into the nonprofit? >> Uh, yeah. So, I mean, I I grew up in Helena, Montana. Um, [laughter] >> yeah. So, I and honestly, when uh I was raised Catholic, uh, but I kind of rejected it when I was uh, you know, when I was young, thinking, you know, someone else was born in a Hindu or Muslim family, I should no long no more go on believing it than they should. But but I ended up uh when I was 18, I I became a Christian. I ended up going to Taylor University. And you know, my faith is is certainly a big part of what drove me to want to make an impact in the world. And and uh um is definitely a a key part of of our mission and motivation. >> Interesting. Okay. So amazing. I love that you helped us level set so we could understand kind of like how, you know, a young man from the western United States, which I got to believe in, Helena, Montana, you didn't understand the concept or live near human trafficking at all. Is that fair to say? >> Yeah, that's fair to say. >> So, I mean, then you're like, you're you're taken into a completely new and different concept. Um, I love that you had the wherewithal or you could you could see around you that there's this pre and post, you know, um, management of a problem. Talking talk to us about how hard it was to even figure out or communicate to those around you what this divide looked like that you could do pre pre-action things versus post because that's pretty innovative. and and you know Julia it wasn't our innovation because of this model was already established in along the Nepal India border it wasn't that hard in fact what we really did is is we uh we we uh found some locals in a place called Janakpur that that we were working with connect with a local church there and they hired uh some staff and we just told them to intercept people to prevent them from being traffic they figured out how to do it and then we went a as as the work grew and we had more teams We went and we learned from them and we wrote it down. We documented the strategy and and really spent a long time thinking about how to make it work in other contexts. And it took us a long time. It I mean we had several failed pilots in Bangladesh and Thailand before it was actually a third pilot in Bangladesh where we finally figured out how to make transit monitoring work beyond Nepal. Um and eventually we would really really just figure out again getting our role right relative to the right nationals and that that is how we figured out how to scale it. >> I got to ask you what is your uh how do government agencies um and I'll ask the same question about communities look at you and your organization. Do they welcome you or are they just like you know not so supportive of your work? >> It varies you know of course by by context. Um but I'll say that we we cannot work without the the support and permission of government. Um it it's uh yeah the way that the transit monitoring works is we have staff who stand in key transit areas like a train like a train station, a bus station, a border crossing, an airport. They look for uh signs of human trafficking and when they see those signs they use questioning uh to uncover the act of human trafficking cases. So it's I mean often traffickers are are present with or intercept along with uh potential victims. And so we we are completely dependent on the cooperation and and security from uh authorities in order to do the work. >> I got to believe this is pretty perilous work. >> Uh I mean it it it is uh our our teams have a lot of threats against them. We've had some incidents. We've never had anyone killed uh thankfully, but we have had uh a number of incidents. But but we've we've learned how and really how important it is to you have to find that the right uh location where you have the right relationship with the authorities uh in order to stay safe. But it's been it's been actually years since we've had a major security incident. >> Wow. Absolutely fascinating. I'm I'm just uh I have so many questions because um the work that you're doing is so beyond what most of us will ever even have to think about, right? Let alone do. And so I'm fascinated by this. Um I want to know what the realities are of working in such different parts of the world. And first and foremost, John, I'm thinking about language and then I'm moving into culture. I mean the issue of just language alone um the Nepoese to Indian language versus what you see in Thailand. >> Holy moly, how do how do you navigate that? >> And and Julia, all those countries have 30 or 50 languages as well. So it is >> living in Nepal for 20 years and leading our work from the field. it what it what I like when I had been there for one year I started think oh I now I really understand what's going on and by the time I've been there three years I was like you know actually I don't know if I do know that much and then by the time by the time I've been there for 20 years the one thing I knew is I don't understand hardly anything and I really can't trust myself my my my judgments and and so we learned essentially that that that gulf that sort of cultural and linguistic gulf is for all intents and purposes unbridgeidgeable. uh and we learned that partially by by you know there's so many pitfalls associated with sort of foreign foreignerled uh development or justice work and and we learned all those pitfalls by walking into them over and over. Um but eventually we would come to articulate what we call our core competency which is what we do relative to the right nationals and that is searching out the people places and tools to maximize mission impact. So we're essentially building these impact maximizing tools and then we're adapting them, installing them and and and choosing those right people. And so once we figured out that core competency and and uh the right way of sort of of working in relationship to our partners, that's when it went from spinning our wheels trying to figure out how to start in new places to it just became easy. And now we we I mean we we start new pilots in new countries. I think there's two happening right now. uh um and and yeah, we we start them with a lot of confidence that they will be effective. [snorts] >> It makes me think about that term white savior and then blending it with the word hubris. Seems to me like you had to kind of step outside yourself and your ego. I loved your comment about looking at the the the years going by and thinking, okay, I'm getting this. I'm getting this and then like I don't get this or you know but that takes a lot of self-awareness for your leadership team if they're also from the west to say holy moly you know we aren't the saviors. I mean it's has that been a part of the discussion or is that just an internal thing? >> Oh totally. I mean that there was I mean I I I definitely have come to see myself as this this bumbling middleman and that you know our donors and our our monitors on the ground those are are the ones that are really making it happen and I'm just blessed to be able to be a part of it you know and that that was important I mean admit your weaknesses is one of our our our values and that was that was important if we didn't do that we would not be anywhere near where we are today and and we've sort of instit institutionalize those practices of of admitting our weaknesses of of criticizing our work of doubting our impact because you know I have huge bias and blindness about our impact and so I we need to be really careful about it really honest about it and honest about the ways that we can do harm and it is it is do no harm is another one of our of our values I mean it's really easy uh uh to do harm because of because of uh the pitfalls because of how little I understand um so Yeah. >> Wow. I am so fascinated by this. Um, and I'm It makes me wonder how did you have the fortitude to go into completely different parts of the world where yet again you have geographic issues but you have such dramatic cultural issues. Did you feel that what you were doing could be replicated? I mean is that was that just like a natural thing? you know, the the issue of what's right and what's wrong. That aside, did you feel like what you were doing was something you could replicate? >> I mean, I I thought so and it but it took us a really long time to figure out how to crack that code. You know, again, a lot of failures, a lot of and and you know, now I mean that core competency searching out the people, places, and tools to maximize patient impact. So when we go into a new country, first of all, we we're uh we'll have a a report written on the country and the feasibility of transit monitoring, different partners and and different things you need to know we would need to know. And then we're going to we have a team that specializes in in champion recruitment. So we're looking for one person, a champion, and and that is a person that that uh would champion, you know, the work there and they would likely become the chair of the board if a board is formed. And so we find that that right champion and we'll go through a process with them with them over zoom uh over the course of uh almost a year of just meeting get to know getting to know them sharing about us sharing about our work sharing about transit monitoring they go and and start to explore in the local context can it work and we're learning is this the right person and they're learning [clears throat] whether whether they want to work with us and by the time that process is over and so we you know we we have someone um who we can and who is going to choose the leadership is going to put together a board and we're not making any of those those judgments across culture and then we [clears throat] come in and what we do is we have these tools and we're going to help you adapt it to your local uh context and and culture and situation. We call that installation and then we're just going to we're going to monitor to uh measure whether you're actually following it correctly. We call that compliance. But it's like the right people and local ownership is really really key uh to the work and and the success that we've had. >> I would imagine that every time you've had this experience and you've navigated through this, you know, uh adoption and management, it's getting better. I mean, you're you're you're learning what are going to be the things that are going to be make something more efficient, no matter the culture, just as long as you can um adapt it. It's really interesting. >> Yeah. And we we lean into a uh just continual improvement like we're constantly asking how can this be better constantly getting feedback from experts from from stakeholders from end users from uh as many places as we can and trying to figure out how we can make our processes more effective and that the continual improvement practices is another part of of what we've seen as as the key to our work. So 2021, I I think our our cost per intercept was about $1,000. And we as all these things started coming into in in to play and all these different flywheels started spinning uh that we just have this unbroken string of months where it was improving until it it $112. >> I'm fascinated too that you figured that out, right? I mean, that's a great metric to share with um everything from, you know, your community partners and and governments to your donors. That's absolutely fascinating. Good for you um to really lean into the um discovery of what that number looks like. Um and I love the trajectory. I think that's a really important metric where you started and where you are now. It's fascinating. We don't have a lot of time left and and you have been absolutely riveting. I want to kind of get into this last part of our discussion about communication and communicating impact. When I'm thinking about this, John, I'm thinking about communicating your work to donors, funders, and even stakeholders. Things are changing so quickly. Your organization looks like it's changing very quickly. Um, and and the size of it. And then we have this we layer in culture and language. How do you keep up with your communications when there's so much rapid change? >> Yeah. And we work in a lot of different countries uh in Asia and Africa. Nepal, Bangladesh, India, South Africa, Namibia, Lutu, Mosmbique, Malawi, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Zambia, Liberia, Bkina Faso, Ethiopia, and Sagal. So, it's a lot of cultures to to navigate and and but the complexity of different cultures is kind of the reason that we do things the ways that we learn how to navigate. That's what we spent a decade or or 20 years uh learning um and uh yeah to to equip the right people for impact rather than command and control. And so we we we are starting to use this this this uh phrase impact engineering. you know, we really to that uh you know, charities should care should care about maximizing impact, you know, because charities love an action. Love love cares about impact because that if it was us, we that's what we would want is more impact. And so, um uh we think that that organizations at least that it's a good thing when organizations can actually say it cost us X dollars to make X, preferably a life-changing impact. And and I think we should be aiming for life-changing impact. And so um yeah the so I mean the ways that this impact engineering that we we find ourselves in like I remember um uh Julia that one of the first projects that we started uh working on 20 years ago was we were developing a a book that was going to be called the poor man's guide and it was a a book about all the things that poor people don't know about that which lack of knowledge keeps them in poverty. We never actually produced a book. We use that those the research behind that in a lot of different ways. Um but the other day I was in Nepal and I was sitting with our our uh now national director deepen and um I we were kind of talking about that and I was like and I pulled out my phone and I was like I told Claude, "Hey, make you know write a book called The Poor Man's Guide that tells all the the thing that poor people lack that keeps them in in poverty." And I set the phone down. We keep talking and then and then I I you know it it finishes it. I'm like, "Wow, look, it did it." And then later Deep and I actually went back and read it and what it what it had produced was amazing, you know. So, so uh in terms of the ways that things are changing, I can tell you that the age in the age of AI uh can really supercharge impact engineering, you know, and social media is actually we our team here in South Africa, the way they get intercepts is they monitor uh social media accounts that are used by traffickers to to uh or advertisements used by traffickers to recruit potential victims. Um and as as we have evolved um we in some ways that that core competency uh that that uh that has been the key to our success. We're we've almost become something like a tech company. Um and that's kind of the identity that we've we've had to have. We we have a human trafficking database one of the largest in the world called Search Light. We have a tech team. We have a data science team. you know, those are the way those are the ways that you know that uh that's what impact engineering we're kind of learning looks like. >> Yeah. Isn't it fascinating? I mean I would say that about my own company um American nonprofit academy we you know started with like these different thoughts and theories and outreach and then ultimately how tech has made us you know better but we have had to reallocate you know our resources to toward towards technology and that starts from within too. you have to have your team adopt that and so no matter what your mission is that becomes kind of a a central light. Very very interesting. I have so enjoyed your conversation. Um I got to ask you this one question. Where do most of your donors and funders come from? What part of the world are are they residents of? >> The US. >> Okay. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Yeah. Um, it's got to be pretty amazing how far away and how distant your mission service area is compared to what most Americans will ever know, >> you know, as their part of the world. >> Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, we as Americans believe that that, you know, people are are created equal and equally valuable. And so, uh, uh, in places where injustice is rampant, you know, sometimes a light touch can make a life-changing impact. whereas it's a lot harder to find ways to make a life-changing impact and it would be more expensive in in the US. So, so our donors are are um yeah, they're they're a generous, compassionate, brokenhearted group that that certainly care about uh the the vulnerable people around the world. Um and and they have had a huge impact. >> Wow. Well, again, our time is almost up and I I'm just dying to ask you this final question and that is where do you see yourselves in the next five years? uh you know Julie at at it is our mission to drive the downfall of slavery in in the places where it's most rampant and so we are going to do that. We we intend to scale transit monitoring. It's a strategy that is rife for uh that is rife for scaling and so um yeah you can um you know think of of the impact that a marked police car has when it's parked in the in the highway. you know, it immediately deters people from speeding. And so human trafficking is happening in an open and rampant way. We come and we set up, we start poking around. Not only is it the people that we intercept for $112 that that are prevented from being traffic, but we believe it actually deters, it has a significant additional deterrent effect. >> Wow. Absolutely amazing. Well, this has really been a a powerful episode. Um, John Moleno. I've just so enjoyed this conversation. He's the founder and the CEO of Lovejustice International. You can go onto their website at lovejustice.ng and learn more about their work. Um, it's a wonderfully crafted website, John. Uh, when you mentioned that, you know, the emphasis of tech in your in your business, you it's it's really displayed at the highest level when you go to your website. Uh it's it's really a great no matter what your work that you do in the nonprofit sector, if you want to see a really beautifully done website, um check this website lovejustice.go out and you can really I think learn a lot. Um such a fascinating conversation. I loved that um I'm starting my day in the western United States, you're ending your day in South Africa. Um and that we were able to have this robust conversation on the nonprofit show. so so grateful for your work and your leadership in our sector. Thank you, John. >> Thank you, Julie. I appreciate the opportunity. >> It's been a lot of fun. Hey, you know, uh we have these amazing conversations like we've had with John today because we have partners that support us and they include Bloomerang, American Nonprofit Academy, Staffing Boutique, your part-time controller, Third Sector Company, JMT Consulting, and Intuit QuickBooks. These are the folks that have really been with us from pretty much all of them since the first episodes of the nonprofit show. Um, as I mentioned to John early on, tomorrow is our 1,600 episode. Say that fast three times. And uh if you want to celebrate with us, join us uh for fundraisers Friday uh where Tony Bell and myself, we work through the different issues that fundraisers have and what's going on in the nonprofit fundraising environment. Um we'd love to have you join us as we end each and every episode. I'm thinking we we always say this message, John, but wow, today I'm really thinking of it in a profound way. And the message is this to stay well so you can do well. [music]