Battling Human Trafficking in Vietnam

I started out as a high school ESL teacher in Sydney and moved to Vietnam in 2002. Initially I was teaching in an economics university but started meeting street kids who wanted to learn English. Before long, my university students and I were running classes and a football club… then we opened a shelter… and soon Blue Dragon was born. I was the CEO until 2022. Now we have 2 co-CEOs running the organisation and I’m in the role of Strategic Director.

It’s a chance to make a change on a very big scale. Blue Dragon is working on the question of how to end human trafficking in Vietnam and we believe that the answers we find will inform anti-trafficking initiatives around the world. Along the way, I have a chance to help so many people out of poverty, slavery and crisis; how could I not do this? An unusual aspect of our work is that we help people at the individual level – rescuing people from slavery and assisting homeless children to get off the streets – while also helping communities and schools to develop and then going a step further to taking part in national law reform initiatives. So we are impacting the whole ecosystem and every day is an opportunity to do something amazing.

I’m on email by 7am, responding to messages that have come in overnight. I’m usually at the Blue Dragon centre mid morning to mid afternoon to meet with the teams and catch up on what’s happening. Lunch at our centre is with the kids and staff together – a highlight of every day and always very lively. In the afternoons I typically have meetings with partners and supporters, both in person and offline. I take a break in the late afternoon to catch up on news and reading; then back to the computer in the evening to review reports and (if I’m lucky) do some writing.

As a founder, the whole organisation – as well as the public – tends to look to you for leadership and pretty much everything else. That works well in startup phase, but for long term sustainability it can be a real problem. So I’ve been spending some years on developing the organisation in such a way that there’s much less reliance on me and much more capacity in our systems and teams to do brilliant work without me. This is why we moved to a co-CEO model, which is working really well, and we’ve worked hard to build up leadership and strong systems across the organisation.

I am incredibly fortunate to see firsthand the outcomes of Blue Dragon’s work. I meet many of the people we help and hear their stories daily. We deal with terrible situations, such as slavery and sexual exploitation, but we also see the change that we can make in people’s lives. Since we started, we’ve rescued about 1,500 people directly from brothels, sweatshops, forced marriages and online scam centres. It’s hard to not be motivated when we see someone set free from human trafficking and given the opportunity to start life over.

Animals and nature are the key to my peace of mind. I live in Hanoi, so it takes some effort to get out into nature or to be with animals, but it’s always worth it.

Right now I’m listening to the audiobook of Ken Wilber’s “Theory of everything” and reading Seneca’s letters.