Our story

After enduring labor trafficking in a religious community, Brandi rediscovered a sense of autonomy through poetry and frequent notes scattered throughout her home. This years-long process has brought her immense freedom and reclamation of her narrative autonomy. Through that messy process, she experienced the betrayal of her pain being re-exploited for an organization’s gain. This invigorated a passion for protecting victim’s stories above profit or personal gain. A survivor’s pain should never be someone’s point of gain and she finally found a safety net with Survivor Network NC. It is within this group of empowered survivors where Brandi met Jasmine and discovered their shared values, talents, and interests.

As a survivor of Familial Trafficking, Jasmine found freedom and healing in written works. Jasmine has always had a love for poetry and has been an avid writer since a young child, using her poetry as a way to express the pain she endured. During college, Jasmine found the power in spoken word and began performing her work as a way to heal and express the trauma she didn't have the language to understand. She now finds freedom, hope, and healing through a variety of writing styles and spreads this hope to others by teaching them how to creatively process their experiences.

Together, they dreamed up what it would look like to help other survivors find their voices and publish their stories, creating Josie’s Guild. As a guild, they hope to build a community of survivors with the same interests and goals of sharing their freedom through writing. Josie’s Guild is named in honor of St. Josephine Bakhita, patron saint of freedom and trafficking victims. St. Josephine lived a very difficult life mired with abuse and dehumanization from childhood until she was an adult. At the age of 21, Josephine was baptized Catholic and spent her days serving the Church, telling her story of faith and forgiveness. Brandi looks to St. Josephine as an example of how to live a warm, fruitful, and faithful life after experiencing violations of her own humanity. As survivors, both Brandi and Jasmine seek to advocate for the freedom St. Josephine found after years of exploitation, specifically through the art of writing.

At Josie’s Guild, Brandi and Jasmine hope to embolden every survivor’s sense of protected autonomy. Jasmine is a licensed Social Worker in the state of Ohio, bound to HIPAA. Brandi maintains HIPAA compliance as a Mental Health First Aid professional and Advocate. Josie’s Guild is meant to be a safe place for survivors to discover how to write what they want to share, with their dignity fully in tact.