Announcements/Business:
- District 5450 Conference is April 27 at the Arvada Center. Registration deadline is hours away, sign up on the District website.
- The barrel is STILL on the ICE!
- Scholarship applications were due last Friday. Joyce is setting up interviews for next week. We need more Rotarians to help with the interviews; Joyce will be sending information about the dates/times/places.
- The 9 Health Fair will be at Our Lady of the Pines Catholic Church Saturday April 27th. Volunteers are needed for the registration table. Please contact Charlotte to sign up.
Program: Joy International, Bill Graf
Devoted to the rescue, restoration, reintegration and
prevention of children forced into the child sex trade.
JOY International, www.joy.org, is a 501(c)3 charity based here in Conifer, CO. “Awareness without action is apathy”, states Dr. Jeff Brodsky, founder of Joy International. In 2010, Dr. Jeff became aware that poor, barefooted children are highly vulnerable to becoming forced into the human trafficking sex slave trade. He took his shoes off then, and he has been barefoot ever since.
Child sex trafficking is recruitment or abduction of a child under 18 who is forced or coerced to commit a commercial sex act. It is estimated that 2 million children are sexually exploited each year; over half are under age 16. In Thailand, 60-70% of sexually exploited children are HIV+.
JOY’s vision is to prevent this from happening and to see each exploited child rescued and given a new life. Through JOY, partnerships are formed with rescue organizations and law enforcement to find and rescue these children. The next step is restoration, placing the children in a safe house, enabling the healing process. Then the children are reintegrated into normal society—some into their own family, if safe, or into other helpful communities.
Prevention is just as important: educating parents and youth, and arresting, prosecuting, convicting and imprisoning the pimps and traffickers.
To raise funds for their amazing effort, JOY holds Barefoot Mile events around the country. It is a mile walk (with or without shoes), either donating or getting sponsors to donate for their walk. On June 22nd, a local Barefoot Mile event will be held at Evergreen's Marshdale Park and Fields 9:00 am to noon. There will be food, music, face-painting and other family oriented activities. Registration is at https://secure.qgiv.com/event/943754. Business sponsorships are needed to support the event, go to http://thebarefootmile.org.
To learn more, there will be a local educational event Saturday April 27th, 9:30AM for adults, 12:00 noon for youth at the Evergreen United Methodist Church, 3757 S. Ponderosa Drive. For more information, go to www.joy.org/evergreen or call 303-674-4810.