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A 59-page report about the ins and outs of Mexico’s trucking industry wouldn’t make most people cry with gratitude, but that’s exactly what Kylla Lanier did.
That’s because the document represented a lot more than trucking. For Lanier, the deputy director of Truckers Against Trafficking, it meant an increased ability to fight human trafficking in Mexico.
The hefty dossier was researched and compiled by a group of four BYU students as a project for the Social Innovations Projects internship from the school’s Ballard Center.
Alicia Becker, the professor for the internship, said the Ballard Center works with award-winning organizations to work on projects that the organization doesn’t necessarily have the resources for but hold a high priority for them.
The fall 2017 semester was the first time the Ballard Center had worked with Truckers Against Trafficking (TAT), a nonprofit dedicated with the mission to “educate, equip, empower and mobilize members of the trucking and business industries to recognize signs of human trafficking and to know what to do when they see it.”
TAT recently obtained a partner in Mexico who was looking to replicate the success that the organization has had in the United States.
The only problem? They didn’t know anything about the transportation industry in Mexico.
“They did not understand their trucking industry,” Lanier said. “They did not have the bandwidth to be able to really delve into that and to get the information they needed.”
That’s where the Ballard Center came in.
To read the full article in the LDS Church News, click here.
