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FAIR fight
From anti-trafficking initiatives to women’s empowerment, Andrea Powell takes on social injustice
BY TAMARA WIEDER

YOU SEE A résumé like Andrea Powell’s, you see a woman who’s been around the nonprofit block. Greenpeace. Clean Water Action. Pathfinder International. EcoLogic. World Cancer Research Fund.

You probably do not see a 26-year-old.

But that’s exactly who Powell is. And it doesn’t stop there. Two years ago, Powell co-founded FAIR Fund, a Cambridge-based organization dedicated to assisting and empowering women in developing civil societies. Though primarily focused on Eastern European countries, Powell and FAIR Fund have begun working domestically, including in Boston, where human trafficking is on the rise. On March 7, FAIR Fund will hold a benefit at Club Passim to support its local anti-trafficking efforts.

Q: Tell me about how FAIR Fund came to be.

A: FAIR Fund was founded two years ago by myself and another woman, named Caroline Tower. We both were young women and felt like young women needed to be at the front of the women’s-rights movement. Both of us had lived and worked in Eastern Europe, and Europe in general, and had seen a lot of the effects of war and economic devastation, and felt like we really wanted to do something. I spent a lot of time researching and getting to know local organizations in the area, figuring out what local needs there were, and all of that sort of built up to 9/11, and I just realized I wanted to stop researching at that point and do something.

We started really small, building a network of partners — local women’s-group partners in different areas. We wanted to focus on empowering women to participate in civil society, and participate in the political process. But I felt like we couldn’t do that until we addressed other issues as well, such as the issue of trafficking of women, and the alarming rates of domestic violence in a lot of these countries; a lot of these things were keeping women down and not able to really realize their potential in the political process. So we coupled a lot of our programming together with the idea of first doing things like working with domestic-violence shelters, and then later opening up campaigns for young women to get involved in the political process. So we’re doing a little bit of both now. And as we were working in Eastern Europe, we started to realize that we also needed to do things here, because a lot of the impact of the things going on over there end up here as well. A lot of the women who are trafficked into this country are from Eastern Europe. Since we’re based here in Boston — and there hasn’t really been a lot of activity in the area of trafficking awareness and prevention in the Boston area — we decided to collaborate with a New York–based organization to bring [an anti-]trafficking training program for public servants, law enforcement, health professionals, and [non-governmental organizations] here in Boston.

Q: For people who don’t know what human trafficking is, how would you explain it?

A: I would explain it as a form of slavery, first of all. People, not just women, are lured into situations they don’t want to be in, and they’re either taken out of their countries or they’re moved to another area within their own country, and forced into either sexual labor or domestic labor, and they’re either paid very little or not at all. Usually there’s some form of coercion to stay there; it could be shame — if a young woman’s trafficked into a foreign country for sex trafficking, then the trafficker usually shames her into staying. He doesn’t really have to chain her to the bed or anything to make her stay — just threaten to tell her family what’s going on, and that usually will keep her there. Or it can be a little old woman who was told that she was going to be working in a bakery, and then she gets here to the States and she’s forced to pick oranges on a farm in Florida for no money. That’s also trafficking. I think that a lot of the publicity that’s around the issue right now really focuses on the more shocking stories, but there are so many stories of people where it’s so subtle. If someone’s held against their will, and doing something that they don’t want to be doing, and they were brought into this country illegally, then that’s trafficking. There are just many ways to define it.

Q: How big a problem is it in the Boston area?

A: It’s really hard to gauge. There haven’t really been concrete surveys yet. But I can say that — and I got this information from the [anti-trafficking coalition] Freedom Network (USA) here in Boston — there are definitely 40 cases open right now in the Greater Boston area, trafficking cases. And that can be more than just one individual per case. There has been some activity to train police officers and other individuals in Boston. It hasn’t really been wide-scale, and that’s what we’re hoping to do with this training, to really get the public’s eye open to what’s going on here, and to get as many people involved as possible. Because that’s the key; usually a traffic victim, they’re not going to identify themselves or seek out help.

Q: What are some of FAIR Fund’s other main initiatives right now?

A: We have another initiative that we’re very excited about. It’s starting up this year in Belarus and Ukraine, and it’s called FemVote. It’s sort of like a get-out-the-vote for young women. We’re organizing young women through either political parties or university groups to have debates and essay sessions, and learn about the political processes in their country, and have discussions about why their vote matters, and to talk a lot about different political parties and why it’s important to be aware of who’s running for office. All of this will cumulate with concerts from local and national musicians in Belarus and Ukraine. We’ll have different political speakers there to vet questions from the young people. We’re really excited about it. We just recently got supported by a Danish organization for the project in Belarus and Ukraine, and it has a lot of potential to grow in our other countries and around the world. I see this program as being able to be implemented everywhere. It actually needs to be implemented here.

FemVote is really like our ultimate goal of what we’d like to do everywhere. But in so many areas, there need to be other activities going on before the community is ready for FemVote. A lot of young women that I’ve talked to over the last few years have said, "Well, that’s great, I’d like to vote, but I need a job, and I need food, and my children need clothes, and I need to get out of this bad situation I’m in, and I just want to leave my country." Even women that I know — I got my master’s in Germany, and I have a friend from the Ukraine, and she called the other day, she’d lost her job, and she was like, "Is there any guy that you know who would be willing to marry me, for a visa there?" And she got her master’s in finance. If she’s that desperate, imagine what the average woman feels.

Q: How do you convince someone who doesn’t have food and clothes for their kids that they should be interested and involved in the political process?

A: I think it’s two-fold. One is providing the services, like leadership skills and job-training skills, within the program. So a lot of the debates and workshops that are going to be going on with FemVote will be, like, résumé-writing workshops. So while they’re there, we’ll talk a little bit about why economic policies are really important to help them get jobs, and why foreign policy is really important, and why they should vote for politicians that would support programs that would help their lives. It needs to be something that helps them right off the bat, like a résumé-writing workshop, and then you can get more into the theoretical — or at least in their opinion — the theoretical about politics. Because that’s really the only way.

For the essay-writing contest, for example, we’re offering prize money for the best essays. You know, something to bring some incentive to doing these essays, and then to draw out the issues based on the essays, like what things are important to them. The essays are going to be like vision statements, like, what would you like to see your country doing in five years? For some place like Belarus, where they’re basically living in a dictatorship, they’re probably going to have a lot to say.

Q: What was your background before FAIR Fund? How did you end up interested in these kinds of issues?

A: I have a background in nonprofit management, and I’ve worked as a volunteer for Greenpeace in Germany; I worked for Pathfinder International in Watertown in program development; and I worked for the World Cancer Research Fund in London in management and marketing, so I just sort of brought all those skills together and felt like I was ready to start my own nonprofit. At the same time, I had volunteered quite a bit for women’s shelters in Europe, and I’d seen a lot of mail-order brides, and I’d seen a lot of abuse, and a lot of people who were probably trafficked, although at the time I didn’t know how to gauge that. I was 18 when I started doing this, so I didn’t really know a lot about it. But I just really wanted to help. I’ve always been a really hard-core environmentalist and thought that was the direction my life would take me, but I just kept being called to these groups and wanting to help, and I found myself buying the entire Eastern Europe section of the New Words Bookstore. I decided, okay, I’m going to have to channel my energy in some productive fashion. I was in debt from buying these books.

Basically there wasn’t a lot I could do as an individual, but as an organization we can do a lot. And while we try to make sure that the local groups that we work with determine the projects and the direction of what we do, we also try to bring different projects together. For example, there’s this women’s leadership program for refugee and orphaned girls in Armenia. They do job training and leadership and a lot of really great stuff. At the same time, there was this other group in Uzbekistan doing trafficking prevention in schools. So we brought the two groups together to talk, and we were like, "Why don’t you guys combine your programs and create something that talks about not being trafficked and protecting yourself, but at the same time gives positive alternatives?" So in that way, we were the facilitator of this network that wouldn’t have otherwise come together. That’s a lot of what FAIR Fund does: try to be aware of what programs are going on in different places, and connect different groups that are often pretty isolated.

Q: Where do you see FAIR Fund in five years, 10 years?

A: Hopefully, we’re just doing more — funding more projects. I’d like to see FemVote in every country we work in in Eastern Europe — and that’s 29 countries. I’d like to see us expand into the Middle East. We’ve had offers to work in Iraq, actually, but I don’t think we’re going to do that right now; I think we need to focus on where we are. And I think that we’ll probably want to bring more people from Eastern Europe into our program, more national people, and have offices there, because I do feel very far away sometimes.

Q: How often do you travel over there?

A: Two times a year. Starting this summer, I’ll be there quite a bit, so my fiancé’s not terribly thrilled. He’s like, "You’re not going to Belarus! That’s final!" Especially because I’m blond, and I don’t look anything like these people. They usually think I’m German, and I usually don’t argue.

Q: It must be hard to not rush into things, though, if you have so much passion for these issues.

A: It is. It is really hard not to just work 24/7. I’ve definitely had my weekends where it’s Sunday night at midnight and I’m like, oh no, I told myself I’d stop at eight! How’d this happen? My fiancé tries to help calm me down. But it’s hard, because I feel like there’s so much to be done. A lot of people say things like, "Isn’t feminism a thing of the past?" And it’s like, well, if you look around this country, most of our politicians are men, men still get paid more than women, and most victims of domestic violence are women. So we’re not there yet. But I think that we also try to include men in our programs, and we’re interested in having an open organization, because I think excluding men from our projects is counterproductive. You can’t tell the abused they have rights and not tell the abuser that they should stop.

Q: Do you feel like you’ve accomplished an unusual amount for someone your age? Do you think about that?

A: No. I’ve had people say that to me, but when I lie awake at night, all I can think about is that I need to do more, that I’m not doing enough and I’m not doing it fast enough. I wish that I could sometimes stop and say, okay, I’m happy where I am. Like, when we got this big grant for FemVote in Belarus and Ukraine, I was happy for about three minutes.

FAIR Fund will hold a benefit concert at Club Passim, in Cambridge, on March 7, at 7:30 p.m. Meg Hutchinson, Lisa Housman, Lisa Bastoni, Ari Charbonneau, and Mr. Sparkle will perform. Tickets are $12; $10 for Club Passim members. Call (617) 492-7679. Tamara Wieder can be reached at twieder[a]phx.com


Issue Date: March 5 - 11, 2004
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