Hello, my name is Charlotte and I’m a Team Manager in Hestia’s Modern Slavery Response Team. Our team supports victims of modern slavery and human trafficking to find services that facilitate and empower their recovery journey.
We support service users who have faced some of the most unimaginable journeys and circumstances prior to arriving in the UK and it is our job to allow these service users to find confidence and independence in the UK.
I joined Hestia as an Outreach Advocate out of university after studying Sociology, and then completed a Postgraduate in Law. I had experience within this sector having completed a placement at Amnesty International and shadowing several Human Rights Barristers around trafficking cases. Having completed my degree, I was determined to work for Hestia in the anti-trafficking sector because our society does not adequately recognise the challenges our service users face or their human value.
I started as an Outreach Advocate for Hestia in December 2020 in the midst of lockdowns which was an incredible challenge both personally and professionally. Our service users were limited with face-to-face sessions and my role was predominantly telephone calls and socially distanced face to face meetings.
As the pandemic eased, I developed my role seeing service users face to face in the community and began to assist them in accessing their local services and signposting them to access services. On a day-to-day basis, this may involve assisting clients accessing their local GP for physical health, sourcing donations such as clothes or items of furniture alongside accompanying service users to legal appointments.
Our goal at Hestia is to empower our service users so that when their journey with Hestia is completed, they feel confident to access these services independently and advocate for themselves.
