Educate youth to prevent child trafficking & Abuse

Wow - what another incredible year impacting lives and transforming communities! 

Summary

This fall our efforts to educate youth and parents about online safety, awareness, and empowerment topics grew by leaps and bounds in Septemeber and October! Between the those two months we did over 1,000 hours of training! 

We trained 300 kids at St. Andrews Catholic school and hundreds more at several Middle Schools. We continue to reach diverse communities with resources and training equiping families with the knowledge and tools needed to navigate today’s challenges of the online environment.

End of summer and early fall is a busy time for us out in the community. We attended dozens of community back to school events, fall festivals and commuinty outreach events. Every event we have the opportunity to meet new leaders, talk with kids and colaborate with other child focused organizations. We appreciate every single partner we team up with to educate and empower their youth. 

Advocacy

Even during the shutdown we were busy advocating for Federal legislation to protect our kids online. With the growth of AI and impact its had on our children, we will continue to stand for our Congressional Leaders to do the right thing for our kids. 

Financial Overview

• Our monthly donations on GlobalGiving continue to grow and for that we are grateful!
• We are expanding our training programs outside of Orange County - excited for the opportunities to work with more youth in the Central Florida community.  
• We had a great Lights on For Children Event Oct 23rd. 100 people joined us for an evening filled with hope and inspiration. We rasised over $40,000 for the event through sponosorships and donatons that evening. We look forward to a great event next year! 

Outreach & Engagement

• We participated in 15 community events this quarter – fall fesitvals and holiday events keep us busying connecting with parents and kids. 
• As you know, we get feedback from the community and our kids. At one event a student from a recent training remembered us, the conversation and asked the outreach team to tell their trainer thank you and they are taking new actions to stay safe - including sharing with their friends. 
  This is why we do what we do—we love educating our kids, they are an inspiration to us!

Impact Metrics

• We've rounded out the year with educating over 3,200  kids and parents. We did over 600 hours of training in the month of October! 
• 80% of kids and 100% of parents surveyed said they would recommend our training.Our team is skilled at creating a safe space for conversation about challenging topics for our kids and their parents to save lives. 
• Kids continue to take new actions like turning off their location settings and turned on their privacy settings, no longer accepting all friend request and some have even deleted apps on their phones. All of these actions will reduce the opportunity for predators to target our kids! 

Challenges & Lessons Learned

• We contineu to look for more ways to engage with parents - we have found that by encouraging students to have their parents attend by either recieving extra credit, getting a dress down day or other incentive seems to work. We'll be doing more of that next year! 
• We continue to get more requests for our trainings than funds allocated. That’s why we are so grateful for the monthly contributions we get from our friends on GlobalGiving and our local grants. God continues to make a way.

Looking Ahead
Thank you for your continued support and we look forward to a powerful rest of the year! We are grateful for your generosity in making an impact with our kids. 2026 will be a great year! 

Links:

• About Paving the Way Foundation