HOW WE WORK

What We Do

Guided by the voices of youth, Freedom Forward develops collaborative pilots to address systemic failures that result in youth experiencing exploitation and brings together stakeholders to pilot new approaches that will benefit young people in San Francisco, and beyond.

GUIDING PRINCPLES

LISTENING TO YOUTH: inviting youth to play a central role in our work

FOSTERING THOUGHTFUL INNOVATION: researching and developing promising new ideas and sharing learnings openly

EMBRACING COMPLEXITY: recognizing that the people we care about, the systems that affect them, and the changes we seek are multifaceted

APPROACHING OUR WORK WITH HUMILITY BUT NOT FEAR

WEAVING A CONNECTED ECOSYSTEM: collaborating with a diverse set of partners across disciplines, minimizing the duplication of efforts

NOURISHING STRENGTHS AND WELLBEING: adopting a healing-centered approach not only for youth but also for our team and our professional community

Why Systems Change?

We don’t believe that there is a single silver bullet or program that will end the commercial sexual exploitation of youth in our city or anywhere in America. Instead, we see exploitation as a result of a dynamic and interconnected web of forces and systemic failures – things like a broken foster care system, a network of services that remains hard for youth to navigate, and a housing crisis within San Francisco that often leaves youth vulnerable to exploiters. Addressing these interconnected issues takes more than building a single new program; we need to shift the way we, as a community, deliver our work as a whole.

How WE DO THIS

Freedom Forward convenes service providers, government, and impacted youth to co-design solutions to specific failure points in these systems. Our approach builds on the success of collective impact, systems thinking, human-centered design, and social innovation labs. We do not serve as a front-line service provider, but rather work with the incredible talent that already exists in our community to pilot innovative approaches to the complex causes of exploitation.