Listen to Michael Brosowski just below or on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Google Podcasts.
🇻🇳 Michael Brosowski and his team at Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation are providing exceptional care to Vietnamese street kids, with the dream that every street kid has someone taking care of them.
💪 They started supporting street kids in 2002 to lift them out of poverty and send them back to school. When they realized that street kids were a vulnerable target for human trafficking, they embarked on a journey to fight trafficking and rescue trafficked people.
😍 Since 2002, Blue Dragon has rescued 1,049 people from trafficking, sent 5,739 kids back to school & training, placed 359 teens in jobs, served 621,193 meals, built 210 homes for families, obtained legal papers for 13,518 people… and much more!
👏 Michael shares how his childhood shaped his willingness to help other people, how he started this 20-year journey by teaching English to street kids in Hanoi with a group of volunteers and how Blue Dragon evolved over the years with more than 100 staff dedicated to making the lives of street kids better.
🤝 We also discuss his initial career as an ESL teacher, his love for Vietnam and his advice to everyone who wants to make a change: identify what you are good at and share it with other people!
🎤 “We are rescuing people who have been trafficked and have made contact with their family, or their family has realised they were being trafficked and contacted us saying: ‘please help’. So a call comes, we gather the evidence, where they are, then we have people who will go to their location. If we can call on the police to intervene, then we certainly do. But if we can't or if there's just not enough time, we set up an escape.
We don't go kicking down doors and, you know, busting in. We don't have guns, nothing like this. When everything goes well, the rescue will conclude with us having a car and being parked outside the building where this woman is kept, communicating with her saying ‘when you have a chance, run! we are outside’, and she will run, jump in the car and we will take off.
It's about setting up an escape because even trafficked women may have some degree of freedom. There are these moments of vulnerabilities that we exploit where no one is watching. We have done rescues where we have been able to find that person and bring them home on the same day that we got the call. And there are rescues that have taken a year, depending on how complex it is to find them”.
❤️ TIMELINE:
14’ - Trust as the key ingredient towards empowerment - ‘you get out of people what you expect’
28’ - From anti-poverty to anti-trafficking
47’ - It all started by teaching English to Vietnamese street kids
56’ - From a team of volunteers to a team of 100 staff in 15 years
95’ - Identify what you are good at and share it with other people
🗒️ REFERENCES:
The story of Luong.
More stories from Blue Dragon.
Connect with Michael on LinkedIn.
Michael’s TEDx Talk - Winning the fight against human trafficking.
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