The Rancho Bernardo Sunrise Club is made up of local business, professional, and civic leaders in the San Diego area. They meet in the mornings, thus giving them their name, and dedicate themselves to “Perfecting the Practice of Service Above Self.” The group is committed to learning more about their community and what needs to exist that should be a point of focus for their efforts. Saved in America’s own Joe Travers, who is the Executive Director, spoke at one such meeting and explained how the work SIA does is combating every parent's nightmare and is working to make San Diego a safer place for families. 

Speaker Joe Travers

When speaking with the Rancho Bernardo Sunrise Rotary Club, Joe Travers explained the horrors of a real-life nightmare that many parents right in San Diego have lived through. This situation, which seems like something from a horror film, occurs when a family realizes their child is missing, and they have no idea where they are or what or who might be involved in their disappearance. The bad guys in this story told so eloquently by Travers are human trafficking rings that are booming even within America’s borders. The triad of evil which is made up of street gangs, prison gangs, and cartels has hit on a new commodity to sell, one that they can make hundreds of thousands of dollars off of, over and over again. This commodity is human life, mostly young girls who are groomed to live on their own, addicted to drugs as part of the crime, and then coerced into the human trafficking industry before they know what is happening. 

Keeping San Diego Safe

Of course, the members of the Rancho Bernardo Sunrise Rotary Club want to make San Diego and all of California as safe as possible, especially for its most vulnerable citizens, the children. Therefore, the education they received from Travers, a professional who knows the industry inside and out, was eye-opening and made the group want to know more about how they could create a safer San Diego. Most of this involves being aware of trafficking that goes on all around as well as giving to groups like SIA, so they can continue their work in tracking down and finding missing kids before they are entrapped by the human trafficking industry.