Photographers make their living by paying close attention to what is in their viewfinders.
Rachel Goble's life, however, was changed by what she didn't see there.
It happened a decade ago, when Rachel was working with a crew filming a documentary about sex trafficking in Thailand and the effects it was having on children forced into prostitution.
What Rachel and her team saw were many groups working to rescue and rehabilitate the girls (and boys), but precious few working to stop the problem in the first place.Rachel Goble worked on a documentary about sex trafficking in Thailand and the effects it had on children forced into prostitution.
"I was really interested in learning what prevention looked like," Rachel says.
WATCH MORE BAY AREA PROUD STORIES
It was an investigation that eventually lead Rachel in 2008 to co-found the SOLD Project, a non profit dedicated to keeping children out of prostitution by means of providing them with scholarships to continue their educations.
"We knew that there was a direct correlation between lack of an education and being at risk or vulnerable to ending up in the red light district," Rachel says.Rachel co-founded the SOLD Project in 2008, dedicated to keeping children out of prostitution by keeping them in school.
Local
Rachel now splits her time between SOLD Projects headquarters in the East Bay and their base of operations in the Chang Rai province of Thailand. In a small village that sex traffickers would regularly prey upon, the SOLD Project now provides scholarships for 144 boys and girls.
While Rachel admits it is hard to quantify the success of her work (figuring out which, if any, children would have been forced into prostitution were it not for the SOLD Project), she is convinced it is working.
Rachel says they have already drawn up plans to expand the SOLD Project to a number of other Thai villages and, one day, she believes this model could even be exported to other countries.The SOLD Project now provides scholarships to 144 children in a village that sex traffickers used to regularly prey upon.
