National Advisory Committee on the Trafficking of Children and Youth in the United States (2024-2026)

Ashlie Bryant is the CEO of 3Strands Global Foundation, an organization dedicated to combating human trafficking with prevention education and providing support to survivors. With over two decades of experience in the nonprofit sector, Ashlie has been a relentless advocate, leading innovative initiatives that have transformed lives and communities.

Under her leadership, 3Strands Global Foundation has expanded its reach and impact, establishing comprehensive prevention education for over 1,000,000 youth nationally and reintegration empowerment programs for 1,000 survivors that address the complex issues surrounding human trafficking. Ashlie's strategic approach has not only increased the foundation's visibility but also garnered significant partnerships with government agencies, businesses, and other nonprofits, enhancing the collective effort to eradicate trafficking.

Ashlie's passion for this cause is matched by her expertise in nonprofit management, fundraising, and program development. Her work has been recognized with numerous awards, highlighting her commitment to social justice and her ability to inspire change. She is a sought-after speaker and thought leader, regularly contributing to national conversations on human trafficking and advocating for systemic change.

Ashlie brings a wealth of knowledge, practical insights, and an unwavering commitment to making the world a safer place for all through prevention. Her experience is informative and also deeply inspiring, leaving individuals motivated to take action and contribute to addressing human trafficking.

In addition to her professional achievements, Ashlie is known for her compassionate leadership style and her dedication to empowering her team and the individuals they serve. Ashlie holds an MPA from Cornell University and a B.A. in International Relations and French from the University of California at Davis. She has completed the Nonprofit Leaders Program at Stanford University and the Public Leadership Credential at Harvard Kennedy School. She sits on the advisory board for Human Rights for Kids and Cornell University’s Brooks School of Public Policy. She also is a Board Director for the Rotarian Action Group Against Slavery and 3Strands Global Foundation.

Trissie Casanova, LICSW serves as the Deputy Compact Administrator for the Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children (ICPC), the Interstate Compact on Juveniles (ICJ), and is the Human Trafficking Consultant for the State of Vermont Department for Children and Families. She tracks all the data for the State of Vermont regarding allegations of minor sex trafficking and consults on all accepted investigations on minor sex trafficking. She has served within these roles since 2016. 

Ms. Casanova has worked for the Vermont Department for Children and Families Family Services Division for over 21 years, in that time she has worked as a child protection worker, juvenile probation officer and child protection investigator. She sits on the Training & Outreach Committee on Human Trafficking, she co-chairs a Human Trafficking Multi-Disciplinary Team in Vermont’s largest county and co-chairs DCF’s Human Trafficking Work Group. As co-chair to the DCF Human Trafficking workgroup, she helped developed a risk of sex trafficking screening tool that is used in Vermont to help assess risk.  

Ms. Casanova obtained her Master’s in Social Work at the University of Vermont and her undergraduate degree in Psychology at St. Michael’s College.

Kimberly S.G. Chang, MD, MPH, is a Family Physician and Director of Human Trafficking and Healthcare Policy at Asian Health Services (AHS) in Oakland, California. In this role, Dr. Chang serves as the Speaker of the House on the Executive Board of the National Association of Community Health Centers, as a Commissioner appointed by President Biden to the President’s Advisory Commission on Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders through the White House Initiative on Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders, and as a subject matter expert and faculty for Health Partners on IPV + Exploitation, Futures Without Violence (a national training and technical assistance partner with the Health Resources Services Administration). 

In 2015, Dr. Chang completed the Commonwealth Fund Minority Health Policy Fellowship at Harvard, examining the role of federally qualified health centers in addressing human trafficking. Previously, Dr. Chang was the inaugural Clinic Director at AHS’ Frank Kiang Medical Center and provided care for many commercially sexually exploited children, trained thousands of front-line multidisciplinary professionals on the human trafficking healthcare intersection, provided invited expert testimony to the US Helsinki Commission on "Best Practices in Rescuing Trafficking Victims", serves on the National Advisory Committee on the Trafficking of Children and Youth in the United States, and co-founded HEAL Trafficking. She was nationally recognized with a Physician Advocacy Merit Award from the Institute on Medicine as a Profession, and featured in the New York Times, U.S. News and World Report, PBS Newshour, the Sacramento Bee, and several podcasts. 

Dr. Chang received her BA from Columbia University, her MD from the University of Hawaii, specialized in family medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and earned her MPH from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Her most recent awards include the Harvard School of Public Health 2020 Emerging Public Health Professional Award, and the 2021 UCSF Alumni Humanitarian Service Award.

Ju’Riese Colon is the Chief Executive Officer of the U.S. Center for SafeSport, where since July 2019 she has led the organization’s strategic vision and direction.

Before her Center tenure, Ju’Riese served as National Vice President of Child & Club Safety for the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, developing and leading the child safety policies and initiatives for over 1,100 U.S. Boys & Girls Clubs organizations and nearly 4,300 Boys & Girls Club locations.

Prior to that, Ju’Riese served as Executive Director of Prevention & Outreach for the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), leading prevention and education programs related to child abduction and sexual exploitation and their delivery to children, families, and the public. Ju’Riese was with NCMEC for 15 years.

An experienced child advocate who serves as an expert on issues related to child safety, Ju’Riese has led prevention and outreach initiatives with youth-serving organizations serving families, educators, law enforcement, and communities. She earned bachelor’s degrees in criminal justice and Spanish from Virginia Commonwealth University.

Bio coming soon.

Marlene Carson is a trailblazer and unapologetic voice for justice who has turned her own story of survival into a global movement of impact. As a formidable leader in the fight against human trafficking, she stands at the forefront of empowering survivors and dismantling systems of exploitation. Marlene’s work transcends activism; she is an architect of change, building innovative solutions that inspire restoration, resilience, and redemption.

Widely regarded as one of the most influential Black leaders in the anti-trafficking movement, Marlene is the founder of multiple transformative initiatives that give survivors the tools to reclaim their lives. Her vision has inspired national policies, global partnerships, and a network of advocates who are equipped to confront one of the greatest injustices of our time. Through her unmatched ability to mentor, mobilize, and lead, she has cultivated a legacy that is not only changing lives but reshaping the future.

Marlene Carson is not just a leader—she’s a movement. Her voice resonates with compassion, her presence commands respect, and her mission ignites hope. She is proof that triumph can rise from tragedy and that one woman’s courage can change the world.

Dr. Angie Cameron Schultz is a Professor of Sociology and also serves as the Executive Director of the Social Research Lab (SRL) at the University of Northern Colorado. She has published over 30 peer-reviewed journal articles, 6 book chapters, dozens of technical reports, and two co-authored textbooks. 

Dr. Schultz regularly teaches courses on sex trafficking and global perspectives of prostitution at the University of Northern Colorado, and as part of her research has interviewed over 100 survivors of sexual exploitation and gathered data on sex buyers at both diversion programs and at point of arrest. She has been invited to present results of her work at the United Nations’ Commission on Crime Prevention & Criminal Justice in Vienna, Austria. 

Her most recent work includes a book chapter co-authored with two survivor leaders titled “Centering Lived Experience Voices: Identifying Systems that Perpetuate Harm for Sex Trafficking Victims and Survivors” and a forthcoming white paper for the National Institute of Justice titled “Human Trafficking Demand Reduction Strategies: A Systematic Review.” Dr. Schultz has also served in an expert witness capacity in legal cases involving domestic violence, trauma bonding, commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking. 

She earned her B.A. in Sociology & Media Studies from the University of Sioux Falls in South Dakota (2001) and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from Purdue University (2007).

Bio coming soon.

Bio coming soon.

Lauri is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health with a master’s degree in maternal and child health. She has spent the last two decades working in Baltimore, Maryland with US-born and immigrant women, adolescents, and their families in the areas of intimate partner violence, sexual assault, and human trafficking. Over the course of her career, she’s provided direct support and crisis intervention services, developed community outreach and education initiatives, and advocated for local and state policy changes to strengthen protections and resources for survivors of intimate partner violence and human trafficking. 

In 2020, Lauri created the Trafficking Survivors Advocacy Program at Asylee Women Enterprise (AWE), a nonprofit in Baltimore, Maryland. The program provides holistic services to immigrant labor and sex trafficking survivors, including intensive case management, group and individual mental health programming, emergency assistance, and immigration legal services. Since its creation, the program has served over 400 immigrant trafficking survivors and their families, including over 200 child survivors.

In 2022, Lauri and her team spearheaded an initiative to serve trafficking survivor youth in Baltimore and fill critical gaps in services available to young survivors. The program provides group therapy, psycho-social education, and social support activities to adolescent and young adult immigrant trafficking survivors in partnership with local service providers, including the HEAL Refugee Health and Asylum Collaborative at Johns Hopkins University. More than 60 survivor youth have accessed the program since its creation.

Sarah Ladd, JD MPA., has worked as the Human Trafficking Child Protection Program Coordinator for the State of Minnesota since 2017. Through the Minnesota Child Trafficking and Exploitation Work Group in partnership with the Minnesota Safe Harbor program, Sarah has led collaboratively led efforts to develop child welfare responses to trafficking and exploitation of children and youth, including implementation of federal laws and the Family First Prevention and Services Act. She has spearheaded state legislative and policy changes creating a noncaregiver trafficking assessment response, making labor trafficking a form of child abuse, and developing specialize residential settings for sex trafficked, exploited and at-risk youth. 

Sarah has been active in the anti-trafficking movement for more than a decade. She began her career as a Skadden Fellow representing survivors of trafficking in northwest Ohio, and continued enhancing anti-trafficking responses by engaging communities to create improved laws, policies, and response protocols, providing training on human trafficking response, teaching classes on human trafficking laws, and publishing scholarly articles and reports on policy and practice. She sits on the steering committee of the National Child Welfare Anti-Trafficking Collaborative and enjoys mentoring and providing technical assistance to federal, state, tribal, and local policymakers building their multidisciplinary response to trafficking. 

Sarah is passionate about collaborating with survivors as subject-matter experts and leaders. She is a cheesehead (lifelong Packers fan from Green Bay), avid traveler (lived and worked in more than 10 countries), and mother to five children. She lives with her husband, children, and two cats in St. Paul, Minnesota. 

Sarah earned her Master of Public Affairs from the University of Minnesota Humphrey School of Public Affairs in 2024, her JD in 2013 from Michigan State University College of Law, and her BA in 2005 from Calvin College.

Shawn MacDonald is CEO of Verité, a civil society organization that works with major multinational companies, worker organizations, and governments to promote workers’ rights and sustainability in global supply chains through research, consulting, training, assessments, and policy advocacy.  

Shawn has broad international experience in labor rights, social entrepreneurship, workplace health, and multi-sector partnerships from his roles as Director of Accreditation at the Fair Labor Association; Vice President of Ashoka; Senior Advisor at Meridian Group International; co-founder of the Development and Employment Policy Project, and various consultancies. He was the founding director of WorldTeach Poland and a Rockefeller Fellow. 

He holds a Ph.D. from George Mason University’s Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution, where his dissertation focused on conflict management between multinational corporations and civil society in conflict zones and in labor and environmental disputes. He also earned an AB magna cum laude in History from Harvard University.

In 2010, Tom began engaging in the anti-trafficking fight and quickly noticed that while men are the primary drivers behind demand that drives sex trafficking, very few were practically involved in effective efforts to abolish it. His vision to create meaningful onramps for men to engage this issue has resulted in the training, equipping and support of hundreds of volunteer men across 20 cities in North America. 

Tom is an active member of several local and national collaborative efforts to eradicate commercial sexual exploitation. Tom also serves as the demand reduction specialist on the Oregon Attorney General’s Trafficking Advisory Committee. He is also the founder of the Demand Collaborative a national conversation among movement leaders focused on the macro-level issues related to the demand that drives sex trafficking. 

Tom has presented both locally and nationally on the centrality of equipping male allies and focusing on demand reduction as a critical component to any strategy serious about combating sex trafficking.

Dr. Rebecca Portnoff is Vice President of Data Science at Thorn. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Princeton University, where she also minored in vocal jazz, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley.

Rebecca has been working in the intersection of machine learning and artificial intelligence (ML/AI) and child safety for over a decade. The ML/AI and algorithmic solutions her team builds have global impact: used across hundreds of law enforcement agencies, hotlines and technology companies. She acts as an ecosystem leader to address emerging threats against children via novel research, standard setting and cross-sector collaborations, bridging the gap between child safety experts and technologists.

She is an MIT Tech Review 35 under 35 innovator, Fast Company AI 20, and serves on the United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute's AI for Safer Children Advisory Board. Her work has been recognized and featured by outlets such as The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press, Forbes and more.

Christine has over 12 years’ experience working on policy reforms to address child and youth trafficking, including development of a new legislative framework that centers state policy work around advancing survivor-centered reforms. Christine authors and leads research and field guidance on emerging issues, with particular focus on unjust criminalization of trafficking survivors, including victim-offender intersectionality and Safe Harbor, and community-driven approaches that seek to prevent the vulnerabilities that can lead to trafficking.

Carly Ryan was 15-years-old when she was murdered by an online predator. It was the first crime of its type in Australia when social media was a new phenomenon and paedophiles were increasing their efforts to infiltrate the online space. Determined to help prevent harm to other innocent children and to help them navigate their online journey safely, Carly's mum Sonya, shared her lived experience and incorporated The Carly Ryan Foundation in 2010 creating an extraordinary legacy.

The Carly Ryan Foundation has broadened its efforts and is now established in the United States and will continue their advocacy to introduce Carly Law there whilst sharing valuable resources and crime prevention initiatives to benefit U.S. citizens and children. Carly’s Law is the first law of its kind in the world being preventative legislation rather than reactive legislation, it gave Police new powers to stop predators from lying about their age to meet children in order to harm them and now overseas forces want to adopt the law. This crime type is borderless, offenders can easily access their victims from anywhere in the world, exploiting them under a veil of privacy and anonymity.

Ms. Ryan has led efforts for over a decade in Australia to make her home country one of the toughest on online crime and harms and is now an expert and international leader in crime prevention. Sonya's lived experience of extreme suffering demonstrates the strength of a mother's love connection with her daughter - the unparalleled power of love.

Staca Shehan joined the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) in 1999 and is the Vice President of the Analytical Services Division. She is responsible for policy decisions and overall operations within the Division including oversight of the Child Sex Trafficking Team, Missing Child & Data Analytics Team, and Sex Offender Tracking Team. In this role, she helps create and manage the division’s budget; conducts print, radio and television interviews about issues relating to child sex trafficking, noncompliant registered sex offenders, internet crimes against children, and attempted abductions of children; and provides training sessions and presentations to the public, private industry, other nonprofit organizations and law enforcement agencies.

In 2011 Ms. Shehan spearheaded the creation of a dedicated Child Sex Trafficking Team at NCMEC to respond to the increased need for technical assistance and analysis in cases involving child sex trafficking. This team of analysts provides support to law enforcement agencies who are working to identify and recover children victimized through sex trafficking and successfully prosecute those individuals involved in trafficking children. These unique resources include analysis of potential suspect names or aliases, unique tattoos, link analysis about child sex trafficking victims/potential victims, telephone numbers, addresses and/or online postings.  

She has also written several articles on behalf of NCMEC regarding child sex trafficking and child missing from care. Such publications were featured in the ’United States Attorneys' USA Bulletin, Vol. 65, No. 6’ and by the OJP Diagnostic Center. Ms. Shehan holds a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from La Salle University with a minor in Criminal Justice and a Certificate in Executive Leadership and High-Performance Leadership from Cornell University.

Joy Thompson has more than 20 years’ experience partnering with community-based organizations, institutions, and governmental agencies. She currently leads strategic planning and development as the Director of Programs at Youth Collaboratory which provides training and technical assistance to federally funded community-based programs spanning more than 35 states. Overseeing two of the three areas of focus at Youth Collaboratory: community building through mentoring and creating liberatory futures through ending human trafficking, Joy holds the unique responsibility of being responsive to the needs of communities, maintaining compliance and developing innovative solutions.

Joy has worked in multiple capacities within the anti-trafficking field including service provision, facilitation of training and technical assistance, program management, advocacy for youth impacted by human trafficking and housing insecurity and developing projects that create pathways to leadership for people with lived expertise.

JR Ujifusa has been working on human trafficking crimes and issues for the last 16 years and is also a Special Assistant United States Attorney for the district of Oregon focusing on federal human trafficking crimes. He is the Senior deputy and supervisor of the Multnomah County District Attorney's Drug and Property unit and Human Trafficking Team which oversees the Sex Buyers Accountability and Diversion Program, First Offender Program, Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children Law Enforcement group, National Sex Trafficking Law Enforcement List Serve, and is the primary prosecutor for all felony prostitution and human trafficking cases within Multnomah County. 

JR created the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Human Trafficking Team and helped create the Portland Police Bureau’s Human Trafficking Unit. JR has trained, presented and been a guest speaker at numerous national and regional human trafficking conferences and trainings. He is a member of the Multnomah County and State of Oregon Human Trafficking Task Forces as well as the U.S. Attorney’s Oregon Foreign Born Task Force. 

JR previously served as the chair of the National Advisory Committee on the Sex Trafficking of Children and Youth in the United States. He co-chairs the Association of Prosecuting Attorney’s Human Trafficking Advisory Committee and the Oregon DOJ Trafficking Intervention Advisory Committee. He has been a Deputy District Attorney since 2005 and has also prosecuted drug crimes, felony property crimes, violent crimes, sexual assaults, domestic violence related crimes, gang related crimes and homicides.

Erin Williamson, LCSW, MPA, serves as the Chief Programs & Strategy Officer for Love146. She is responsible for leading the development, implementation, and operation of Love146’s US Survivor Care and Prevention Education programs. Ms. Williamson has over 20 years of direct service, program management, and applied research experience in the fields of social service and criminal justice, with particular expertise in the areas of human trafficking and child sexual exploitation. She has authored several peer-reviewed publications, presented nationally, and served on national advisory committees, including the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services National Advisory Committee on the Sex Trafficking of Children & Youth in the United States. Ms. Williamson has an MPA from American University and an MSW from The Catholic University of America.

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