Historic Beginning of SA & its Program Models

The SA vision began in 1989 when the SA founder received her commission to start up a program in Calgary, Alberta that is designed specifically to meet the unique long-term (3 to 7 years) recovery needs of sexually exploited youth, women and their children. This pilot program soon grew, and over eleven years expanded into:

• 3 front-line houses
• A day program offering training in abuse and drug/alcohol recovery, and life skills development
• Related business initiatives
• Pre-employment training
• A babysitting service, and
• Transitional and Long-term Affordable Housing

The SA founder and team, considering this project’s next step of growth, founded the SA Foundation (Servants Anonymous) – Canada in Calgary, AB in 1995 for the sole objective of fundraising on the project’s behalf for the purpose of developing its related business initiatives, transitional housing and babysitting service.

These business initiatives not only provide on-the-job shadowing and training to program participants, but also set the tone to envision and plan for long-term financial sustainability. In addition, transitional housing was developed to support the transition between front-line and long-term affordable housing and the babysitting service was made available for the children coming with the young women who entered the program. Please visit this program's websites for more information [www.servantsanon.com] [www.fireworksco-op.com]

Once completely established, this program gained national attention due to its tremendous success with this population. The entire program is structured to provide care and services (with increased independence at each level) for up to seven years – exactly the long-term approach that is needed to heal young women that are so terribly damaged!

In the year 1998, the SA Foundation began to be increasingly approached by individuals in other communities that wished to implement this recovery model in their own cities. In response to this need the Foundation modified its purpose in the year 2000 and started its World Services Division in which the SA Founder and team undertook the writing of the SA program model into training documents and set about screening and training SA charitable franchises.

The SA Foundation’s first project in developing countries was begun in the year 2001 in Kathmandu, Nepal to not only provide services to youth and women that are sexually exploited (or at risk of becoming so), but to also include a focus on trafficking. Over seven years, this program expanded to include:

• Awareness raising
• Informal education classes
• Income generation programs such as kitchen gardening, pig/cow/goat keeping, and sewing for women in high-risk communities
• Border monitoring
• Emergency shelters
• Short and long-term housing
• Recovery programs, and
• A fair trade initiative that produces handmade items by program participants in order to provide them with skill development and income to become self-supporting

Today, the SA Foundation continues to disseminate its program models, to train and mentor charitable SA franchises and to fundraise to support their development.

Click on the tab "Organizations Built on the SA Model" for a list of current program sites.