​Volunteer interior designers turn girls' shelter from drab to welcoming for teens escaping sex trafficking. Volunteer interior designers turn Brittany's Place from drab to dreamy to encourage girls to stay awhile. 

Designer Lisa Ball put up a new painting in a former office space, assisted by Bridget Zak. The volunteers turned institutional decor into colorful and fun spaces to welcome the girls.

PHOTOS BY RICHARD TSONG-TAATARII • RICHARD.TSONG-TAATARII@STARTRIBUNE.COM





Could big comfy pillows, colorful bedding and rugs, freshly painted walls and decorative art help protect girls from abuse and exploitation? Maybe.

In fact, it's the hope of the staff of Brittany's Place, a shelter for child victims of sex trafficking. The shelter got a free makeover this month when a volunteer group of professional interior designers turned stark bedrooms and lounges into bright, cheerful, teen-friendly places where girls can enjoy hanging out — and maybe stick around a while longer.

The girls at Brittany's Place can move in or out as they wish. Temptations to leave, perhaps to reconnect with the very people who exploited them, can be dismayingly strong. Late one night last year, a sex trafficker stood outside the building calling for a girl who had told him her location.

"Every night a girl stays here is a night she's safe," said Dan Pfarr, CEO of 180 Degrees, a St. Paul organization that provides services and shelters for youths and paroled offenders. "We're really trying to create an atmosphere where girls feel safe, feel welcome. … Environment changes everything."

Staff members have always worked to make girls feel welcome and comfortable, but the building's interior, a look best described as "institutional," was not helping. The wall colors were drab when the shelter opened in 2015. By early 2020, they had also endured five years of wear and tear in a building that shelters about 100 girls a year.
​
The staffs at Brittany's Place and 180 Degrees, the nonprofit organization that runs Brittany's Place, thought brighter colors might feel more inviting, so they requested professional advice about paint.
But interior designers Jennie Korsbon and Lisa Ball found it wasn't just the walls that were drab. The bedrooms were small, their furnishings austere, like dorm rooms before the freshmen arrive.

"After coming here to look at the paint colors, we realized there was a lot more we could do," Korsbon said.

"Before we knew it, they had lined up interior designers to decorate each bedroom," said Janet Hallaway, advancement director at 180 Degrees.

Most years, members of the Minnesota chapter of the American Society of Interior Designers (ASID) collaborate on a Showcase Home. They designate some luxurious residence, where each designer gets a room and a generous budget. In 2020, though, the project was canceled because of — you guessed it — COVID-19.

So Korsbon and Ball, members of ASID's community service committee, proposed that volunteer designers could focus their sprucing skills on Brittany's Place, dividing the rooms among themselves. But compared with Showcase homes, 180 Degrees' decorating budget was considerably less extravagant — about $2,000 to cover the whole project.
That wasn't going to do it. So designers pitched in their own money and collected donations from businesses including Ethan Allen and Benjamin Moore.

"The dollar value for the rooms is low," said Richard Coffey, 180 Degrees' senior program director. "But the value of creating those rooms to the youth they serve — you can't put a dollar figure on it."

Plymouth designer Christine Tanaka "jumped at the chance" to join the project, aided by her 11-year-old daughter, Sienna. "It's a concrete example of how you can use your talent and your energy to do something good in the world," Tanaka said.

Her ideas weren't just visual. She left two books on the desk of the room she decorated: Michelle Obama's memoir, "Becoming," and "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," Maya Angelou's classic 1969 autobiography about overcoming racism and trauma.

The budget was beside the point. "This is way more rewarding than working on those Showcase Homes," Korsbon said. "This just obviously feeds your soul."

Americans unfamiliar with sex trafficking might think of it as a crime that happens somewhere else. In fact, Minneapolis is one of the top locations in the country for child sex trafficking, according to the Minnesota Attorney General's Office.
But victims come from all parts of the state — cities, suburbs and small towns — and from various backgrounds and family situations. They include all races, although the majority are girls of color. Many are vulnerable because they're homeless, have addictions or are being physically or sexually abused already. They are trafficked by predatory supposed "boyfriends," sometimes even by family members.

One girl, the youngest ever to stay at Brittany's Place, had been "passed around" by family members and their friends, said Michelle Hall, program service specialist. She arrived at the shelter with drug addiction and signs of severe physical and sexual abuse. She was 11 years old.

For this reason, laws around and terminology about sex trafficking is changing. For example, what used to be categorized as prostitution, a crime for both the provider of sex and its solicitor, was redefined as exploitation in 2011 when Minnesota's Safe Harbor Law was established, recognizing that minors sold for sex are victims, not criminals.

More attention is also being drawn to places where sex trafficking increases, such as big sporting events and concerts.

​"I look at large sporting events so differently since I've been working here," said Coffey, a former forward for the Minnesota Timberwolves.

The shelter is named in memory of Brittany Clardy, who came from what many would describe as an ordinary background. She lived with her two parents and siblings in St. Paul, got good grades in high school, planned to go college, and worked at a recreation center with children.

But she lived a double life, her family later learned. Her sexual services were being advertised online where one night she was solicited by a man later convicted of murdering her. She was 18 years old.
Now the shelter that bears her name offers trafficking victims education, therapy and whatever other help they need to fix their lives. Sometimes it works, even if it takes multiple attempts.

"We may see them again," when they leave Brittany's Place, Hall said, "Or we may not see them again."

Brittany loved butterflies and the color purple. Some designers incorporated those aspects into their decor, including one long purple wall in the hang-out room that also holds books, games and a big TV.

The designers also sought feedback from the girls on what colors and images they'd like to see. It was important to give them choices because "they lack choices in their lives outside the shelter," Hallaway said.

"It was all over the board," Korsbon said. Some said they wanted calming colors. Some wanted bright colors. Some of the younger girls wanted unicorns.

​To protect their privacy, the girls generally don't interact with visitors. But as the designers applied the finishing touches to their rooms, several sent handwritten notes.
One girl commented: "I actually like it because the rooms here were plain and looked like shelter rooms, but with them getting redesigned [they] will be better and will make girls feel like they're worth something and they [can] accomplish something."

​"I think the renovations are nice," another girl wrote, "and it's cool that they're doing this."
To Krystal Hollins, Brittany's Place's senior program manager, that understated note reflects one of the most important elements of the project. The designers are role models. Not just as successful professionals, but as "a community of humans who will be kind."

Kindness has been scarce in the lives of many of these girls. The designers show that, somewhere out in the world, "there's a lot of possibility," Hollins said.

​"There's hope."

Katy Read • 612-673-4583 • @Katy_Read
Katy Read is a reporter covering Carver County and western Hennepin County. She has also covered aging, workplace issues and other topics for the Star Tribune. She was previously a reporter at the Times-Picayune in New Orleans, La., and the Duluth News-Tribune.

​Right to left: Interior designer Lisa Ball put up a new painting in a room formerly used as an office space, with assistance from Bridget Zak.

​This donated quilt features patches dedicated to Brittany Clardy, for whom the shelter from sex trafficking is named.

​Pressures brought on by COVID may be behind uptick across Twin Cities, suburbs. 
​By Katy Read Star Tribune​

Photo above: Abigail Botten, left, 180 Degrees Program Manager, helped Youth Advocate Chantra-Lee Jackson get the pantry arranged in the kitchen at Chanhassen’s Hope House.
Photo by: RICHARD TSONG-TAATARII • RICHARD.TSONG-TAATARII@STARTRIBUNE.COM
​
FEBRUARY 16, 2021 — 12:48PM
Bob and Sue Downs remember many of them vividly.
The boy found huddled in a culvert under a street in downtown Chaska on a 10-below night, body temperature dangerously low. The boy who sneaked into the Chanhassen Dinner Theatres and hid under a stage. The boy who slept under a Chanhassen bridge among "scary dudes" for six weeks after his mother, who struggled with mental illness, kicked him out for eating the last slice of pizza.
"When I speak to teachers, I tell them, 'These kids are in your classroom, and when they leave your classroom they don't go home,' " said Bob Downs, himself a retired middle-school teacher. The teachers' "eyes get wide."
For about 30 years before retiring as foster parents in 2018, the couple hosted hundreds of kids in their big Chaska farmhouse, bearing witness to an oft-hidden reality: Even in affluent suburban communities, teenagers experience homelessness — a problem that family pressures associated with the COVID-19 pandemic may only exacerbate.
Meanwhile, safety nets intended to protect young people — from child protective services to medical and mental health providers to schools — have been less accessible because of the virus.
Places to hang out, like libraries, coffee shops and stores, have been closed.
Homelessness overall, including among youth, was already on the rise before the pandemic, according to Wilder Research, which leads the Minnesota Homeless Study every three years. In 2018, according to an estimate considered conservative, 5,800 kids under 18 had experienced homelessness — 11% more than in 2015.
Problems affecting family members, such as physical or sexual abuse, mental illness, chemical abuse, conflicts over LGBTQ identity, can push kids at all income levels out of their homes.
In Carver County, one of the wealthiest in Minnesota, the rate of homeless youth is similar to other counties in the metro area and the state as a whole.
In 2019's Minnesota Student Survey, 2% of boys and 1% of girls in Carver County reported that they had been on their own staying "in a shelter, somewhere not intended as a place to live, or someone else's home because [they] had no other place to stay" in the past year.
Suburban kids often prefer to stay near jobs, friends and schools rather than seek shelters in downtown Minneapolis. Chanhassen's Hope House — a comfortable house that shelters homeless youth, primarily from the western suburbs — last year took in 120 young people but had to turn away 135.
That's the most ever, which may be due in part to increased awareness of the five-year-old shelter.
But most likely a significant portion "is a direct result of COVID's impact on families," said Dan Pfarr, CEO of 180 Degrees, a St. Paul nonprofit that operates Hope House.
COVID-19 will "exacerbate everything," Bob Downs said.
Amanda Stewart, an emergency-room pediatrician and Harvard Medical School instructor who has researched the pandemic's effects on children, said the combination of kids being home from school and families being stuck in one place can lead to fights that end with kids leaving home or being kicked out.
A July article in Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said "it is likely that stay-at-home orders, combined with increased economic instability and family pressures, will increase [youths'] risks for harm and, in some cases, may make it untenable [and potentially dangerous] for them to shelter in place."
Schools offer kids respite from troubled families and provide opportunities for staffers to spot signs of abuse, said Fredrick Blocton, chairman of 180 Degrees' board. With schools closed, those problems become invisible.
"School can be a really stabilizing force in young people's lives; taking it out of the equation is going to have a big impact," said Michelle Decker Gerrard of Wilder Research, who directs the Minnesota Homeless Study.
More than 80% of homeless youth Wilder surveyed reported having "adverse childhood experiences," including living with someone who abused substances, parents with mental health issues, being physically or sexually abused or witnessing the abuse of another family member and being neglected.
In October, when the survey was conducted, 22% of homeless youth had spent more than a week outside and 38% spent more than a week "doubled up," or living with someone else temporarily.
The pandemic may reduce opportunities to stay with friends, leaving young people vulnerable to exploitation.
Because they don't usually fit the stereotypical images of the homeless — people sleeping on sidewalks or holding cardboard signs at stoplights — homeless teenagers are often invisible to casual observers, advocates say.
Pat Barry, chief deputy at the Carver County Sheriff's Office, said deputies who see people living in their cars — often near places like convenience stores that are well-lit, open long hours and offer cheap food and access to bathrooms — can offer help finding services.
Homeless youth are tougher to recognize, he said, but members of the public can help.
"I would encourage people to be vigilant and if they see something that just doesn't look right they should call," Barry said. "It's never an inconvenience for us. ... At minimum we've saved some kids."
Katy Read • 612-673-4583

Katy Read is a reporter covering Carver County and western Hennepin County. She has also covered aging, workplace issues and other topics for the Star Tribune. She was previously a reporter at the Times-Picayune in New Orleans, La., and the Duluth News-Tribune.

katy.read@startribune.com 612-673-4583

**FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE**
March 3, 2022
​St. Paul, Minnesota

​180 Degrees has again received the Charities Review Council’s Meets Standards® seal, a visual marker on nonprofit strength. Nonprofit organizations, such as 180 Degrees, earn the Meets Standards® seal by voluntarily participating in Charities Review Council’s Accountability Wizard® review process. The only web-based product of its kind, the Accountability Wizard® is a time-tested tool, elevated by nationally recognized capacity building practitioners and philanthropic thought leaders. 

The Accountability Wizard® is based on Charities Review Council’s 25 Accountability Standards®, a 
balance of nonprofit sector promising practices, public expectations, and legal requirements, 
representing the shared expectations between donors and nonprofits. The review process 
examined four key areas: Public Disclosure, Governance, Financial Activity, and Fundraising. As a result, 180 Degrees has aligned its practices, policies and procedures to widely accepted 
standards of accountability, leading them to greater strength, efficacy and to the achievement of the 
Meets Standards® seal.

"The Charities Review Council's process has helped us to create thoughtful policies which protect our clients and provide greater transparency to donors as well as the general public," says CEO/President Dan Pfarr.

180 Degree‘s full review report is available online at www.smartgivers.org, and the organization will also be listed in Charities Review Council’s bi-annual Smart Giver Newsletter.

​FOR MORE INFO:   CONTACT:  Janet Hallaway   janet.hallaway@180degrees.org