What is January every year? It is Human Trafficking Awareness Month, and we would like to tell you a story to kick off this year’s awareness month about a fantastic program implemented locally by Project Protect our Children’s Education programs at Kingwood High School and in our backyard. If you don’t think there is a problem of human trafficking in Houston and our backyard, you are sadly mistaken. Just the other day in our surrounding area, there were 30 young people identified as being trafficked and rescued. It’s real, and it’s here to stay. It is time to open our eyes to the problem and do something about it. It all begins with education. As young people growing up in our community, we never understood the magnitude of the problem.

Every 26 seconds, another individual is trafficked. What does that mean, and what is the quantifiable impact of these 26 seconds? The numbers are staggering, and the problem has a long and complex history. Houston, where we live, has become one of the leading centers for trafficking in the United States. We interviewed people in the fight and asked, “Why Houston?” They attribute this to the diversity of Houston as a city and community. Houston is also close to the border, making it easy and convenient to be a distribution center for trafficking. The children we are bringing awareness to can be your next-door neighbor, at your school, local playground, or your church, and should not be for sale in any way. Yet, despite the tireless efforts of governments and non-governmental organizations, sex trafficking remains a widespread and deceptive crime affecting millions worldwide and locally in Houston. What is lacking is education at all levels and awareness of this issue in the local community. We decided to partner with Project Protect Our Children and find a fun way to bring the local community together and raise awareness of the growing issue of child sex trafficking during Human Trafficking Awareness Month in January by hosting a pickleball tournament. The tournament was held at our local high school, bringing families together to better understand the need for education with a little healthy competition.

Project Protect Our Children (PPOC), a 501c3 non-profit organization founded in 2019 by Denise M. Mears, is an initiative focused on preventing child sex trafficking, exploitation, and abuse. Their primary mission is to engage communities proactively, implement preventative educational programs, raise awareness, and provide empowerment opportunities. PPOC has a passion for combating human trafficking. Their work in this area has helped many children in our community gain awareness and understanding to recognize the deceptive tactics used by predators. With the increased use of technology and the internet, predators have found new avenues to engage, entice, and entrap children both in the physical and the virtual realm. The organization’s primary goal is to equip youth with the knowledge and skills necessary to identify and respond to potentially dangerous situations. By addressing the challenges posed by technology and online platforms, the initiative aims to empower children to protect themselves from exploitation and abuse.

“Human trafficking is one of the worst evils in this world; it has just risen to the second most profitable illegal industry with about 30 million humans trafficked worldwide. I joined PPOC’s Youth Action Board for one mission, and that is to decrease and eradicate human trafficking. The first thing anybody could do is to spread awareness. With my team and PPOC, we have spread awareness to over ten thousand students in the greater Houston area, and as I graduate from high school, I hope to not end there but to continue my goal and mission to see human trafficking end.” – Janak Krishnan

Furthermore, this issue is personal to one of our team members, Tamir Shaw. Tamir was brought to the United States through international adoption, but otherwise, her life trajectory would have been questionable. Unfortunately, the region of Ethiopia she is from is going through an ongoing civil war and facing widespread child trafficking. Young women similar to Tamir are being sold into slavery as indentured servants or as child brides, even in the present. Tamir realized while doing this project that her adoption most likely saved her from becoming a modern-day child slave in Ethiopia.

“When I think about the statistics of human trafficking globally and locally, I am overwhelmed at how this tragedy could have been my life story as a victim. I not only experience the freedom to live, but I can be a little part of a movement that is raising awareness on educational programs locally in my community today.” – Tamir Shaw

Not only was she a potential victim of this issue, but there are many victims in our local community of Houston. Victims can be anyone, male or female, rich or poor, who is manipulated into taking actions that they think will benefit themselves but instead end up enslaving them.

Why Pickleball?

After recognizing the problem at hand, we brainstormed as a team to come up with a way that would engage our community and raise their awareness of the problem. Why pickleball? Pickleball has become a fast-growing activity in our local community, and we thought that by partnering with PPOC and hosting a regional family pickleball tournament, we could raise not only awareness but also funding for the education programs needed. As a team, we decided on the Freedom Pickleball Tournament held at Kingwood High School on Tuesday, January 2nd, from 4-8 pm. The tournament was competitive while still bringing the right level of awareness to the issue that is needed in our community.

Registration opened for the Freedom Pickleball Tournament on November 30th, and teams and sponsors actively signed up. We spent all of December making sure our t-shirts and signage for each court that is sponsored are completed. We worked on creating  tournament brackets and continuing to raise awareness and work on exceeding our goals for registration.Website to Register at: Freedom Pickleball Tournament

While our goals were ambitious, we worked hard to get other clubs at Kingwood High School involved and families to come alongside our team to get the word out via social media for the tournament by creating an Instagram site and promoting the registration and sponsorship via X (formerly known as Twitter), Facebook and Instagram. We also wanted our Instagram site to serve as a place for sharing the “Why?” for the tournament and be a source of information for donors and others who may want to sponsor at a smaller level.

The last goal was our main reason for doing the tournament, and that is raising awareness on the issue of human trafficking. This led us to move our tournament to January to maximize awareness and funding teaming with PPOC. This allowed our tournament to be the kick-off event for Human Trafficking Awareness Month in our community. We have stories and programmatic information streaming on our Instagram site to highlight the need to raise awareness of education programs against human trafficking in our local community.

Kingwood High School Tennis partnered with us to provide the courts and location for free as a key sponsor for this event. We decided to wait to launch the social media pages until the end of November as people lose interest, and a shorter timeline for engaging people to sign up for tournaments is typically sufficient. In October and November, we lined up our key sponsors and volunteer groups, and our registration preparations were in place to start in late November.

We created a website using PPOC as a landing page for registration and information. We used QR codes, flyers, and our Instagram page to push information out to the local community. This allows the money collected for registration and sponsorship to go directly to PPOC and the organization. This was decided as a seamless approach for our team to not be handling the money of sponsorship and registration and keeping the money transactions clear and easily tracked upon completion of the event. The budget was intentionally small as we benefitted from an accessible location for the tournament donated by Kingwood High School. We still wanted to make sure we had what was needed, so our core sponsor was willing to cover our expenses.

We know the timing of the tournament in January was not ideal for DECA, and the holidays, but it was the right move to make it happen as the launch to Human Trafficking Awareness Month in January for our community. This not only brings awareness to the issue we are working with but also generates more money with the tournament happening at year-end giving for families. Year-end giving is a time when families allocate cash for charitable donations. We have been able to see the increase in giving aligned with this for our tournament.

This event would not be possible without the support of Kingwood High School and the community at large. The sponsors helped us spread the word and take the fundraising burden of the team to focus on community awareness. Our targets became a larger community as each of our core sponsors spread the word to their communities and customers through Instagram on the problem of human trafficking in our backyard of Kingwood, the Humble area, Houston, and beyond. We were able to team with larger companies and groups to spread the word on human trafficking through the partnership of Ace Shirts, Talk of Texas BBQ, Six Zero Pickleball, and Crust Pizza Kingwood Docs.

The tournament was a success. We had 32 teams with 64 participants that showed up rain or shine and weathered the cold to play some competitive pickleball. The teams participated in the raffle, raising over $1500 just that night on raffle tickets for a donated $225 paddle from Six Zero Pickleball. The buzz was created, and families are already asking about next year’s event.

“We are so proud of the work the Kingwood High School DECA and YAB clubs did to kick off Human Trafficking Awareness Month by hosting the FREEDOM Pickleball Tournament.  The tournament provided an opportunity to engage, educate, and empower community members to learn more about human trafficking, thus filling one of the most significant identified gaps in the prevention and identification of human trafficking within our communities.  Thank you for all your hard work and dedication to becoming part of the solution in the fight to end human trafficking!” – PPOC Executive Director and Founder, Denise Mears

What started as a project for our Kingwood DECA competition team (Tamir Shaw, Mackenzie Kouba, and Peyton Hutchinson) has now turned into a passion for us to fight for this more significant cause in our Houston community. Our vision is to create Human Trafficking awareness annually with a pickleball tournament that brings our community together over this larger cause. Stay tuned for next year’s Freedom Pickleball Tournament and more updates from this team. Join the Movement Today!