Highlighting Indigenous Voices in Minnesota with Your Call MN
Highlighting Indigenous Voices in Minnesota with Your Call MN
Perodigm Blog, May 2022
We’ve talked in this blog series about the importance of working with Indigenous-led businesses and why collaboration is so important in the private sector. In this post, we want to highlight one of the most important issues facing our Indigenous community in the upper Midwestern United States.
For the past two years, Perodigm has worked across Minnesota, raising awareness for a troubling but deeply important issue - sex trafficking.
The awareness campaign, Your Call MN, was a statewide effort to r
aise awareness about sex trafficking and increase reporting of suspected sex trafficking. The campaign launched in partnership with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA)-led MN Human Trafficking Investigators Task Force (MNHITF) and the Tribes United Against Sex Trafficking (TRUST) Task Force in 2020.
Over two years, we reached nearly 103 million impressions for Your Call MN through a variety of efforts, including strategically placed billboards, targeted social media advertisements, and the production of an award-winning documentary video series highlighting the voices of nonprofit organizers and advocates in Minnesota. This life-saving campaign has made a real impact, and at least six individuals are known to be receiving services specifically referred from the Your Call MN campaign.
Produced and directed by Perodigm with help from our partners at Backflip, the documentary Your Call. Our State. Their Lives. is one of our most important projects to date. We are very proud to have worked on the campaign and were excited to be recognized for a number of awards, including Best Documentary at the 2021 Reale Film Festival, the Viewer Impact Award for Social Issues at the 2021 Doctors Without Borders Film Festival, and Best in Show at the 2022 American Advertising Awards.
American Indian Housing Organization
Over the course of the campaign, we partnered with more than 15 organizations and individuals who have dedicated their careers to working with victims of sex trafficking.
AICHO, the American Indian Housing Organization, was one of the nonprofit organizations highlighted in our video series. You can watch the video here
Sex trafficking especially impacts the Native American community in Minnesota. Between 27 to 54 American Indian women and girls in Minnesota were missing in any given month from 2012 to 2020 (2020 MMIW Task Force Report). In 2017, the most recent data available, nearly 75% of survivors receiving services in Minnesota were BIPOC (2019 Report on Sex Trafficking in Minnesota, prepared by the Minnesota Office of Justice Programs and Minnesota Statistical Analysis Center).
The video highlights the important work done by AICHO, including the organization’s Dabinoo'igan Emergency Shelter, which serves victims of physical and sexual violence, trafficking, and stalking who need immediate shelter.
###
