Coaster Crawl Success!

On August 8, What’s Your Response (WYR) took to the streets for our first “coaster crawl” to bring awareness to the issue of human trafficking in Austin, and the crawl proved to be a giant leap for our grassroots campaign. It may have helped that we were featured in the Statesman paper on the same day, because we had a great turnout of nearly 50 individuals – we call them abolitionists – who devoted their Saturday afternoon to educating local bars and coffee shops about modern-day slavery in Austin.

We all gathered at BookPeople bookstore, organized into groups, and went around town distributing free stacks of drink coasters to many establishments. We didn’t band together and parade or blitzkrieg the town. Instead, we went out in separate small groups, gave our business to these local establishments, and gently mentioned our campaign by showing the managers and owners our coasters, which really do the story-telling for us. Each coaster featured one of three real stories of people who had become slaves right here in Texas, including examples of factory-labor slavery, domestic slavery, and sex slavery.

By the end of the day, we had distributed a total of 21,000 coasters to 42 bars and/or coffee shops. Each team came back with stories of how the shops and bars responded, and not surprisingly (and unfortunately), most of the businesses’ managers and owners had no idea that human trafficking was occurring in Texas. But thanks to the efforts of WYR volunteers, now they know!

The fact is that each person who becomes aware of the reality of modern-day slavery brings us all one step closer to helping prevent the horrors of it. And even though this first initiative may have been a crawl, it really was a big step in increasing slavery awareness in Austin.

And keep in mind that WYR is a grassroots movement. Every single person matters, and we need YOUR ideas to affect positive change. We encourage you to become part of the WYR project, contribute your ideas, and when possible, your time. We’ll have more opportunities to spread awareness (and we have more coasters), so keep checking in with us and help stop human trafficking!