Dear Colleague:

I am pleased to present to you the Office for Victims of Crime (OVC) Services for Trafficking Victims Discretionary Grant Application Kit. The kit contains two solicitations for funds authorized by the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 and appropriated by Congress during Fiscal Year 2002. The first solicitation provides funding to create, enhance, or strengthen services to trafficking victims, while the second supports training and technical assistance for service providers.

Trafficking is nothing short of a modern form of slavery and a fundamental violation of basic human rights. Some 50,000 victims are trafficked into the United States annually, many for the purposes of sexual exploitation; others for forced labor. Most are subjected to continuous psychological and physical coercion ranging from verbal threats and abuse to starvation, rape, and physical torture. While the United States is marshaling its resources to work with other countries to combat this growing crime, communities are rarely prepared to address the complex needs of trafficking victims, especially when large numbers are simultaneously identified.

Serving trafficking victims poses special challenges for the victim assistance field. Responding to the often severe and episodic needs of trafficking victims places great demands on the limited resources of most victim service organizations. Planning is difficult because few organizations can predict if or when they will be called on to serve trafficking victims, or what the demand on their resources will be. Service providers frequently do not have the experience to address the legal, immigration, and cultural issues that trafficking victims bring. Congress appropriated this funding to help organizations develop innovative strategies to serve victims and to leverage existing community, state, and national resources for effective interventions and services. OVC structured the victim services solicitation to afford communities and organizations flexibility and creativity in tailoring an application that reflects their resources and needs. The other solicitation addresses service providers' needs for timely training and technical assistance.

Finally, these programs are intended to support, not supplant, your efforts to meet trafficking victims' needs. I hope the opportunities presented here help you achieve that goal.

Sincerely,

John W. Gillis
Director