Do you know what happens to Ukrainian orphans who age out of the orphanage system?
Meet the founder of Mission 823 Shawn Sullivan who is working with the at-risk kids in Eastern Europe to live a fulfilled life in a loving and supportive family.
This amazing team builds and operates homes for children in Ukraine, hosts youth camps in the Carpathian Mountains, Community Outreach Events and so much more!
It takes a substantial amount of work, time and energy. Learn how you can volunteer, host a church project, become a partner, donate a financial gift or contribute a life skills opportunity.
The following is adapted from an interview on March 1, 2021 that I published on my Youtube Channel: Rescuing At Risk Youth with Shawn Sullivan, Mission 823.
————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————–
Hi friends, thank you so much for tuning in today, I’m Adrienne Balkum. I am so excited because today I have in the studio with me Shawn Sullivan the founder of Mission 823. Thank you so much for coming in and talking to me about your mission and it’s more than just a mission. So why don’t you tell me a little bit about the at-risk youth that you’re involved with?
Mission 823 has been serving in Ukraine for about 20 years now and we started with a phone call from someone who asked us to go and give them a ride to a graduation ceremony for an orphanage in northern Ukraine and I didn’t know what that meant. What I found out was that when kids graduate from the orphanage systems in Ukraine. Basically they’re aging out of a system after ninth grade. They’re 15 or 16 years old and they go to the street and that terrified me. Because I realized that these 150 children that we have just been introduced to had no one and and nothing to support them for the days in front of them–they’re only 15 or 16 years old. What are they gonna do? And so we initially started kind of a humanitarian outreach to help the children.
Humanitarian Outreach Projects
They had no running water, they had no toilets, no heat, no shower facilities and so that was kind of our gut instinct first response. But then started working to develop a whole life support system for these kiddos.
What we’ve further realized was that this one orphanage in Ukraine was only one of 750 facilities like that and all totaled in the country of Ukraine about the size of the state of Texas more than 120,000 children like that lived in these facilities.
So that’s kind of where we started years ago and then over time have branched out to serve many different types of at-risk children in the country.
Orphans, refugees, poverty stricken children, human trafficking victims and targets of human trafficking, abused and neglected kids and children that live on the street all of those categories of kids are vulnerable to being exploited and manipulated and suffering and so we serve all of those kids.
Developing Healthy Strong Christian Families
So this is not just a ministry. This is more of a program that can help people so that they don’t get back into a terrible situation right? What are some things that Mission 823 is developing so that the child doesn’t get back into it on the street? What kind of projects are you all working on?
Well I guess the starting point for us is understanding the philosophy and the old mentality or the old philosophy of caring for children was. If they’re at risk for these terrible things in their life then we need institutions and programs to kind of serve them. Well, that mentality and that model really exhausted itself and failed the children all over the world. Not just in the Ukraine.
Here in the states, we have the same problem with the foster care system. Those sorts of things their deficiencies and failures in those systems and they just failed the children.
What we discovered a long time ago, we’re not being arrogant we just know that historically families serve children best. So all of our base philosophy about how to best support children who are at risk of any of these categories of difficulty is to help to develop for them healthy strong Christian families who can serve them and care for them the way that God designed families to take care of kids.
And so all of our programs point back towards supporting families, adoptive families, guardian families that can take care of these kiddos.
Wasn’t it a couple weeks ago you had a huge success with Ukraine’s government? What was the new laws in Ukraine that passed?
It’s been about 30 years since their independence from the Soviet Union. Just this month as a matter of fact, we were able to work with our NGO partners and our government partners in Ukraine, our stateside foundation sponsors to help to facilitate the passage of legislation in the Parliament of Ukraine that made it illegal for the first time in Ukraine to create, to possess, to watch, or to distribute child pornographic materials digitally or any other media format and it also included the aspect of any type of grooming for the purpose of exploiting children in the future.
In other words, grooming children to prepare them for human trafficking so all of that is now illegal, as of this month in Ukraine.
That’s a huge milestone, huge step in success for these programs to succeed especially for the child to be able to have a chance–I don’t want to say a sense of normalcy. I’m glad there is remedy for those who have been violated in these horrific situations.
So I’m thankful that you’re out there. You know, you are a fighter, you’re brave and you’re doing what you believe that God has equipped you with and you’re executing your God given godly gifts. And so thank you for doing that. We need more people like you and so I want to encourage y’all if you haven’t checked out Mission 823‘s website look right here check it out learn a little bit more about what they’re doing.
What does your acronym ORPHANS stand for?
We simplify for people the process of how we serve these children by just giving a little acronym so that you can remember who we serve and why.
O is for orphans, obviously, children who have no living kin folk. No living relatives and children who are classified as social orphans which is the majority of the hundred thousand plus that live in the state institutions in Ukraine right now. So more than a hundred thousand of these children actually have living relatives, but they don’t have anybody that can actually care for them. They’ve been deemed unfit so they are wards of the state. So that’s the orphan category.
Refugees there’s an ongoing war as of this month in Ukraine we’ve marked the seventh year of hostilities conflict from Russia against Ukraine in Crimea and in the Donbass region. More than three and a half million people suffering from humanitarian crisis. More than two million refugees about 600,000 of those are children and we are serving those in cooperation with the federal government of Ukraine providing youth camps and healing restorative rehabilitative services for those kids.
Poverty-stricken children that’s an ongoing problem in culture everywhere. There are people who are in economic disparity and so we’re working with them to try to provide humanitarian relief social skills, you know different type of training to help them to restore their families working with human trafficking victims.
We’ve talked about that in targeting for human trafficking abused and neglected kids and street children. And that’s how you remember that: Orphans, Refugees, Poverty-stricken, Human trafficking, Abused, Neglected and Street children spells orphans. And that’s how you can get your head around that.
A program for this to work to function effectively everybody has to be able to communicate with each other from the government all the way down to the volunteers…Am I on the right page?
Yes.
What if you have a heart and passion to get involved, but you don’t know where to start can anyone join Mission 823?
You can become a partner, you can donate financially, you can also, bring your church into going on missions and to do special projects. Sure we incorporate a lot of volunteer activities, because there are people who have different life skills and giftings that can contribute to helping us to provide models for these children to have greater opportunities in their lives they they don’t know that some of these things exist.
In other words, whatever it is that you do for a living, you can teach these children how to sustain themselves and when children are independent and they can care for themselves by providing a living for themselves then they reduce the risk of being on the radar of people who would exploit them human traffickers and so anything that you can do that can help you care for your family you can teach those children.
Any basic life skills that we would assume because we’re taught from childhood. We can never assume that those children have ever been exposed to those things like the fact that you should brush your teeth daily or the fact that you know how to clothe yourself and prepare food for yourself basic life skills that we grow up with. We can’t ever assume anything that you know how to do you can transmit with value on our volunteer teams.
If you’re a medical person, medical professional would regularly do medical missions, humanitarian water filter and food distributions, teaching english is critical to setting these kids free. So if you have an ESL background, English, as a second language background you’re a teacher and you can come alongside these kiddos and teach them how to build the foundations for learning language that will set them free literally.
We have kids that we employ and our partners employ that make 10 and 12 times the national wage outsourcing themselves through a laptop computer and a cell phone so that they can work with millionaires in Orlando. Teaching them how to do social media creation and content creation reading, real estate contracts, weird things, you know that just set them free.
Creating opportunities so anything that you know how to do you can be of value with serving. Whether it’s building or construction or teaching or serving there’s lots of ways.
So let’s talk about some partnerships that normally don’t often get highlighted so you know we briefly talked about that you work with district attorneys and other people in law enforcement can you talk a little bit about that what does that look like?
Yeah basically, we talked a little bit before about how for a human trafficking or an anti-human trafficking initiative to be effective it has to be comprehensive and so you can’t just break down doors and steal children back. That’s not how it works, none of those things, hold up in court. Unfortunately, there’s legal systems that also support the rights of criminals and so you have to build programs and initiatives that are very very comprehensive where every person that’s required in the chain from prevention, resources, training, rescue and aftercare are all working together in the same vein. They’re all communicating together and they’re all focusing on not violating the dignity and the health and stability of the victim and so what we call that is trauma-informed victim-centered care.
So we work with the office of the president of Ukraine, we work with the parliament, work with the ministry of justice, the prosecutors, the judges, the court systems, the human trafficking, task forces, digital forensics specialists, cyber crimes specialist, the juvenile police of Ukraine, all of those people work together to build programs in our investigative approach that protect the child and gain prosecution at the same time.
How To Protect Your Children At Home From A Gateway To Human Trafficking?
Did you learn anything from having these types of relationships and partnerships that you can be able to encourage parents that are here in America and or they’re having troubled youth?
Well the digital world is you know everything that we do in life is right here (picks up cell phone). We basically spend half of our lives in you know in this little bitty four-inch world and it’s a really dangerous place and I think that many times parents take for granted, because they’re in their own living room or the child’s in their own bedroom.
The parents think the child is safe, because they can’t be harmed while they’re locked inside of their house. In today’s world, most of the preparation for a child walking outside of your house and connecting with somebody who would abuse them to death it happens right inside your own home, through cell phones, through digital media, through computers, through social media, and so I would absolutely encourage parents with this one thing.
When you buy your child a cell phone. You own that cell phone. When you pay for the service for that cell phone. You own that cell phone and you own all of the activity on that cell phone and you own all of the communications on that cell phone. And what will happen I can guarantee it. Somebody will attempt to exploit your child and ruin their life for their own profit if you do not monitor and control the content on your children’s cell phones. They will be targeted. They will be approached. I guarantee you.
Monitoring all of their chats by looking at all of their apps some of them look like calculators. They hide them on their phones. Lots of different ways so be very careful that you monitor your children’s digital communications, because online through a laptop, through a desktop, or through a mobile device is the gateway these days.
We’ve heard of gateway drugs. This is a gateway to you know –human trafficking.
So is there anything that’s on the horizon with upcoming events that you’re working on that you want to share?
Yeah as a matter of fact, I was in Paris, Texas last night. It’s a great place I love Paris. I went to the Eiffel Tower and took a selfie. We have some partners up there that helped us to finalize the last funding necessary for a family home that we’re building for adoptive parents and orphaned children in the Carpathian region of Ukraine.
In the next few weeks we’re going to be finishing down to the turnkey to be ready to open the doors of a brand new three-story home in the Carpathian region for adoptive children that’s in the works.
Two months ago, we launched a brand new church that came as a result of some youth camps for traumatized children that we’re doing in a village outside of Kiev and so that’s in process right now and gearing up for youth camps and travel with teams and our Human Trafficking Task Force from Ukraine is going to be joining us here in the states to learn more about the CJC. The Children’s Justice Center (CJC) approach for caring for victims and the investigative process they’ll be joining us here.
And then we’ll be taking a team of police and law enforcement specialists that will go to Ukraine and teach law enforcement how to do digital forensic investigation and find criminals that are attacking our children. So lots going on.
A lot is going on that’s awesome! I am so glad we got to do this and I hope that volunteers will get connected with Mission 823. Please visit their Facebook fan page to get their updates, join their newsletter and if you can make a contribution with action or through financial contribution it would be very much appreciated, because a lot of people depend on it. It is also life-changing for them. So thank you so much Shawn.
1 comment