Leadership lessons — a nonprofit on the front lines of child trafficking

Lee Wochner:
Twenty years ago, Michael Brosowski arrived in Vietnam. His charge? To teach at Hanoi’s National University. But there are jobs, and then there are life missions. What happened shortly after Michael’s arrival in Vietnam changed his life, and the lives of tens of thousands of children abducted a gun, that’s hard to say.

What happened shortly after Michael’s arrival in Vietnam changed his life and the lives of tens of thousands of children abducted under false pretense and enslaved as he discovered the realities of human trafficking and set out to eradicate it. Since then, Michael and his organization, the Blue Dragon Foundation, have rescued more than 20,000 children from slavery and other brutal circumstances.

help them get reunited with their families, get an education and well, just be kids playing football and growing up healthy and safe. Today we’ll talk with Michael Brosowski about his work, about leading a life of impact, about how to build a nonprofit organization capable of such success, and about how one goes about rescuing teenage girls from a Chinese brothel on this episode of That’s What C Said.

Jaclyn Uloth:
Welcome to the podcast that lightens the tension when things sort of get hard…
That’s What C! Said, the Counterintuity podcast, featuring interviews with leaders and doers who have helped to make our world a better place through their actions — and especially through marketing, communications, and embracing change. Here’s host Lee Wochner.

Lee Wochner:
Michael, thank you so much for joining us today. It’s a pleasure to have you.

Michael Brosowski:
It’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks so much for inviting me on the show.

Lee Wochner:
And you’re actually joining us from Vietnam, is that correct?

Michael Brosowski:
That’s right. I’m speaking to you from a farm today just outside Hanoi. Normally I live in Hanoi. I’ve lived here for more than 20 years.

Lee Wochner:
But that is not a Vietnamese accent, is it?

Michael Brosowski:
No, it’s not, and it’s definitely not a Vietnamese surname. I grew up in Australia. I’m Australian. My father was a German immigrant to Australia, born and raised in Sydney.

Lee Wochner:
Very good. So you are the founder and strategic director of the Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation. What does Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation do?

Michael Brosowski:
Well, we started off about 20 years ago. In fact, we’re celebrating our 20th birthday this year. We started off simply helping street kids in Hanoi. There were lots of kids who had come to the city from country areas to make money for their families and they were sending it home. And so a few of us just said, let’s help these kids. Let’s get them back to school. That has evolved into a more general kind of approach to protecting children. And then it evolved further to stopping human trafficking because both street kids and a lot of people from around the country are very vulnerable to being trafficked and sold. And so Blue Dragon rescues people from slavery. And we work very hard to prevent it from happening in the first place.

Lee Wochner:
So, wow, let’s back up a moment. So when you say they came to the country or from the city, is that OK? Did they come in their own?

Michael Brosowski:
So we’re talking 20 years ago now, and the situation with street kids is quite different these days. But what was happening then was that kids, and very often it was a boy from the family, was coming to the city, and very often his mother would also come. Mum would be working on the street, selling fruit from the baskets. You know, you might have that vision in your mind of the woman in the conical hat with balancing the baskets over her shoulders.

Lee Wochner:
Mm-hmm.

Michael Brosowski:
She’d be doing that or collecting scrap on the street to sell for recycling while the sun was shining shoes. Sometimes the kids would come on their own though and you know the whole purpose of it was they were they were building up a little bank balance each month and then sending that home so that their sisters and brothers could go to school.

Lee Wochner:
So let’s go back to the horrific topic of human trafficking. And I’m going to ask you the baseline questions just to make sure that we cover this ground. What is human trafficking?

Michael Brosowski:
Here in Vietnam, it is people being deceived into thinking that they’re going with a friend or going for a job and instead becoming exploited. It takes various forms here. In particular at the moment, the most common form is people being tricked into leaving Vietnam thinking they’re heading to a neighbouring country like Myanmar or Cambodia or Laos for a job and then being forced to work in a, what we call a scam center, which is where they have to scam people online and extract money from them under false pretenses, under threat of serious violence. So that’s a very common form of trafficking here. People are also trafficked to be sold as brides. They may think they’re going with a friend or going on a quick business trip and they’re sold as a bride. People are sold into brothels. Kids are take up jobs. And this can happen within Vietnam as well. They take jobs thinking they’re going to get paid and months later they still haven’t been paid. That’s a form of trafficking. And they’re not allowed to leave. Someone might hold their paperwork. So human trafficking is all about forcing someone or deceiving someone, coercing someone into doing something that…that they don’t want to do and preventing them from leaving. And here it takes many different forms.

Lee Wochner:
So this is a form of slavery is what this is. But not even buying somebody off the auction block, which was horrible enough, but just deceiving someone so they seemingly willingly enlist in something they think is life improving, but actually they become a human slave.

Michael Brosowski:
And you’ve hit the absolute key to it there. People here in Vietnam, it’s a very hard working country. Visitors to Vietnam are always impressed by the work ethic of people. They’re up early, they’re working late, they keep going, keep going. People want to improve their lives. And sadly, that actually makes them vulnerable. So when it’s someone living up in the mountains, perhaps an ethnic minority person, living in a village, there are not many opportunities around. Someone makes friends with them, maybe online, maybe in person, saying, hey, you know, I’ve got a great job. Sometimes it’ll be tricking parents, saying, you know what, your children could come with me and learn how to become a tailor, or they could, you know, they can come and learn a trade with me, and geez, they’ll make so much money. And people in that situation, where they’re very, very poor…They may be desperate, they may not be able to pay a hospital bill, their house might be falling down around them, they may have no other source of income, and they think, well, look, this is the first time I’ve had an opportunity, I can’t pass this up, I have to try. Now, you know, we always say when there’s someone who is poor, when they’re asking for a handout, we always say, well, you know, you should go and get a job, you should lift yourself up. That’s what people here are doing and traffickers take advantage. Yes, trying to improve themselves.

Lee Wochner:
Recently on flights that I’ve been taking, there’s more recently signage that I never saw before. I’ve been flying for many, many years. And now when you’re in the restroom, invariably there’s a sign saying, if you are being, if you are a victim of human trafficking and if you’re being held against your will, please do this and the flight attendant and crew will help you. This…

And I’ve just noticed these relatively recently, and it makes me wonder, what is the scale of this disastrous problem in Vietnam and elsewhere?

Michael Brosowski:
Oh wow, yeah. Look, those signs, by the way, I think they’re a great idea. I don’t know how helpful they are, but they’re definitely worth trying. And hopefully someone’s collecting data on them. The problem can be that very often people don’t know that they are being trafficked until they actually reach the destination. Um, so those signs are worthwhile and well done to people who’ve put them around. But, uh, but let’s see if, if they’re effective. You know what, if they save one person, they’re worthwhile. The scale of it, everyone wants to know the numbers and nobody really has the numbers. It’s quite odd, you know, you can, you can, when I think back to while we were in the COVID lockdowns, you know, you could look up data daily on how many people around the world had COVID. Human trafficking, much harder to know. The best estimates that have been developed tell us that there are about 50 million people around the world, including a few hundred thousand in Vietnam. But those numbers, they’re based on all sorts of assumptions and sensible estimates. But in the end, they’re almost a guess. I personally believe that the number is a lot higher than that. And certainly for Vietnam.

Blue Dragon is rescuing about 300 people a year directly out of places of slavery. And we know that we’re not really getting beyond the tip of the iceberg, but our rescue numbers are going up every year. A couple of years ago, we were rescuing 200 a year. And we are aware of thousands of people who are in places that just can’t be reached.

Lee Wochner:
Hmm.

Michael Brosowski:
And of course, not only that, going back to your signs in the airport stalls, so many people don’t know that they are trafficked. Um, there are people who are in slavery, who, if the police were to raid, would say, uh, look, I’m working for very poor wages or the boss is, is gonna pay me like in the future, but no, I, I haven’t been trafficked. People don’t always know it because we do think that trafficking involves being in chains, or being locked in. Some victims, a lot of victims may be locked in, some may not, and may never see themselves as a victim of human trafficking or slavery.

Lee Wochner:
And you do this work internationally. Blue Dragon does this work internationally. You have an international board of advisors, I saw. So you’re headquartered in Vietnam, but you’re doing this work elsewhere as well as an organization.

Michael Brosowski:
Yeah, so our rescues are all in the Southeast Asia region. We haven’t yet expanded our network to be rescuing people in other countries as well. It’s all in the countries sort of surrounding Vietnam. But we do have chapters in the US, in the UK, in Germany, New Zealand, and our governing body is in Australia. And they are like friends of groups. They are raising funds, helping us in practical ways, getting the message out to the public, because I think a lot of people don’t realize the scale of this problem, and helping people understand it. I mean, we can’t solve it until the world gets behind it and says, let’s put a stop to this. So those international chapters of Blue Dragon have a really important role there.

Lee Wochner:
Let’s talk about a couple successes. So I believe I read that in 2005, Blue Dragon performed its first rescue of a trafficked child. Can you tell us about that, how that happened?

Michael Brosowski:
Yeah, it happened a little bit accidentally, actually. Uh, at that time, Blue Dragon was a street kids organization and we were working in Hanoi, but I was taking a few days off and I was in Saigon or Ho Chi Minh city down in, in the south of Vietnam. And, and I just noticed a little boy, uh, later found out he was 13 years old. Uh, and he was walking up and down the street selling flowers. And I noticed that every time he sold a flower.

He would then head back down the alley to where a few women were sitting and he would give them the money and then he’d continue walking up and down. And clearly something was wrong. Now I knew enough Vietnamese at that time to be able to have a bit of a chat with him and say, what’s going on here? And I mean, he was very upfront with me. He wanted to go home. Sometimes people who have been trafficked will not…

tell you honestly upfront because they don’t know who you are, they don’t know what you’re going to do, but he was like yeah I want to get out of here help me. So I did what I thought was the right thing to do, it was not the right thing to do, but I paid off the traffickers. I found out how much money it would cost and it was something like $50, but then the next day I left Ho Chi Minh City, I went home.

Lee Wochner:
Oh. Wow.

Michael Brosowski:
to Hanoi and the traffickers didn’t let him go. I lost my $50 and this boy, his name is Ngoc, he was still in this terrible situation and I’d given him this hope that he would be set free and I’d failed. Now at the time we had a young man volunteering with us and he was a law student. He’s now our chief lawyer. And he’s actually won a very prestigious award from the United States government for his anti-trafficking work. At the time, he was a law student. And I went back to Hanoi and I told him about this and I had the phone number for these traffickers because Ngoc had given me their number. So our lawyer got on the phone to them. And basically what he said was, you know that foreigner? you took his money, wow, you know, big problems. He’s a very important person. Have you ever heard of the United Nations? Now look, Blue Dragon was about a year old. There was no way we had any influence or power, but it worked. These women thought that they’d crossed the wrong person. And within hours, Ngoc was on a train on his way home.

Lee Wochner:
Yeah.

Hehehehe

Michael Brosowski:
So paying them off was the wrong thing to do, but bluff certainly worked. And we learned a lot from that first rescue.

Lee Wochner:
Awesome.

Lee Wochner:
Just so we understand, if there are two women in an alleyway, right, that he’s going and paying after he sells each flower a bunch of flowers, and he’s 13, it’s not possible in that situation for him simply to run away?

Michael Brosowski:
So, you know, he was 600 kilometers from home. His parents had been told that he was going for a life-changing opportunity. And now here’s a really important cultural element. This is how it plays out in Vietnam. There are versions of this everywhere else, USA, every country. In this case, this boy, he was, his family was desperately poor. What we found out when we went to visit.

Michael Brosowski:
They were living in a tin shack on sand in a typhoon zone. And every time the typhoon came, which was three times a year, their house just blew away. And they picked up the pieces and made it again. Gnock had never been to school. His parents were illiterate. OK, so you get the picture. Desperate poverty. The traffickers had come along and had said to his mum and dad, let me help you, your son’s gonna be very successful. They took him to Ho Chi Minh City. They took him first of all to a center where volunteers were teaching English, foreign volunteers. They let him go into the center and study English for a couple of hours. And they took photos and they posted the photos of this little boy from this tin shack sitting with foreigners.

Michael Brosowski:
in a beautiful room learning English. Now for that boy, apart from the logistics, he had no money, no resources, he was 600 kilometers from home. Apart from all of that, in his mind, he would have so disappointed his parents to just run away. So he not only needed help to leave where he was, but he needed help to go home, for his parents to understand.

Michael Brosowski:
what had happened and to not be disappointed. Now, in reality, his parents were mortified when they found out what had happened. But in his mind, he was responsible for helping his parents. That’s a very strong cultural element here that makes it hard to deal with human trafficking.

Lee Wochner:
Wow, that’s quite a story. And there’s another one in 2007, you rescued six teenage girls who were trafficked and sold to brothels in China.

Michael Brosowski:
Yeah, so we actually went in search of one girl. She was one of the girls from our street kids program in Hanoi. Now, again, very poor, living in a slum area. And she had been missing for about six months before she made this call. And she didn’t call us. I think she could remember just one person’s phone number. And she rang this friend and asked them to pass a message on. Now the girl had a speech impediment. She didn’t know where she was exactly. And this call was just like, please help me, I’m in China. And then the line went dead. It was made from a payphone. That was it. That was all the information that we had. Now we reported it to the police, but we were going to the anti-trafficking police saying, hey, there’s someone in China.

Michael Brosowski:
and they need you to rescue them. Well, okay, China’s a big country, where is she? And there was just, there was no information. So we sat on this for a few days and then we thought, okay, maybe we can guess where she is. So by this time, we’d been doing a few rescues. After we rescued Ngoc in 2005, we discovered that there were a lot of kids from his village in slavery. And we were…

Michael Brosowski:
going and doing these rescue operations, bringing home five, six kids at a time. So we thought, well, look, we know enough about this. Why don’t we see if we can guess where she is? And we did some research. Someone was able to say to us, look, there’s this town just across the border from Vietnam, and it’s got a lot of brothels with Vietnamese girls. Like, maybe she’s there. And it made sense because she had called from a payphone.

Michael Brosowski:
And this young girl, she didn’t have much of an education. We assumed she didn’t know how to make an international phone call. So it must be somewhere near the border. Okay, so there’s our whole set of assumptions. That’s everything we knew. A couple of our staff just went to that little town across the border, and within hours, they saw her. Now she’d been kept in a brothel, but even in the brothels,

Michael Brosowski:
Girls need to go out. They need to sometimes get their nails done, get their hair done. In this brothel, each morning they would go with a guard. Actually, there were two guards, one at the front, one at the back. And they would have breakfast outside and then they would go back. And so that was how this girl had been able to make the call in the first place. She had just slipped away for a few minutes. She’d said that she needed to go to the toilet and made a call.

Michael Brosowski:
So our staff were able to follow her back to the brothel, but she saw them and she knew who they were. And we, over these phone calls we were having, we said, look, we can’t leave her in that situation. She might now sort of do something desperate because she has seen us and then we’ve left. And so we set in place a ridiculous.

Michael Brosowski:
rescue operation that worked, our staff went into the brothel and pointed to the girl and said I would like her please. And they went up to a room and were having this desperate conversation. What do we do? How do we get out of here? When another girl came to the room and she was pounding on the door from outside, my staff opened up the door and this

Lee Wochner:
Hmm.

Michael Brosowski:
I know what you’re doing. Take me with you or I’m gonna scream and tell everyone. So now we had two girls in a brothel. Clearly, you know, we had gotten in over our heads here. My staff went down with two girls and he said, look, I would like these two girls, please, but I’d like to take them to my own hotel. I don’t like this brothel. And he paid the money.

Lee Wochner:
Mm-hmm.

Michael Brosowski:
and the guards agreed. Now, he didn’t have a hotel, he had a car. And so he was walking with these girls to the car. And the driver kind of gave it away accidentally. The driver sort of waved them over and the guards saw that and attacked them. And so they ended up fleeing for their lives, two blue dragon staff, two girls in a car, racing towards the border, which is of course where the military is based.

and they were promptly detained. And at that point, the Chinese military, they arrested them and took them to a kind of a camp. But they also, well, the four Vietnamese people, my two staff and the two girls, because they didn’t know who they were. The girls had no paperwork.

Lee Wochner:
arrested two, the girls and the.

Lee Wochner:
Right.

Lee Wochner:
Mm-hmm.

Michael Brosowski:
and here they are racing in the border area, something was suspicious, like what’s going on here. Very much to their credit, the Chinese military did a very good investigation there over a few hours and realized, oh wow, okay, you’re the good guys here, let’s help you. And the next morning, the military went back to the brothel and released four more girls.

So in the end, we had six girls come back to Vietnam and they just arrested everyone running that brothel. So that was our first incredible, and it was our first and very nearly our last rescue outside of Vietnam. And it was three years before we did another rescue. At the end of that one, we said, that’s it, we can’t do this again. The problem was that

Lee Wochner:
That’s an incredible story.

Lee Wochner:
the

Michael Brosowski:
because we knew how to do it, because we had done one. The next time someone needed help, we couldn’t say no. But I can assure you, we do them a lot more safely and with a much better planning these days.

Lee Wochner:
That’s an amazing story. We’re gonna take a short break here, but when we come back, Michael and I will be talking about how Blue Dragon spreads the word and about its work to rescue children from exploitation. Stick around.

Jaclyn Uloth:
Hi this is Jaclyn with Counterintuity.

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Lee Wochner:
And we’re back with Michael Brosowski, founder and strategic director of the Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation, who just told us an amazing story of daring do, of going to rescue one girl from a brothel and winding up with six. Michael, what were the ages of these girls?

Michael Brosowski:
The youngest girl was 17. That was the girl that we had gone to rescue. So two of them were 17 and the others were up to 21. So kids and barely more than kids.

Lee Wochner:
kids and it really doesn’t matter what age nobody should be enslaved. So you started out as a teacher if I’m correct, is that right? And so can we talk a little bit about what your transition, what you brought you from being a teacher assigned to Vietnam and then into doing this sort of work? What was that journey like?

Michael Brosowski:
Well, so I was a high school English and ESL teacher, English as a second language teacher in Sydney, where most of my students were Vietnamese. And even during high school, and I’d gone to a rural high school in Northwest New South Wales.

And even at high school, there were some Vietnamese immigrants who turned up at the school and I volunteered to teach them English. So I had this long history of teaching Vietnamese students. And I first went to Vietnam just on a holiday. It was my first trip out of Australia. And I just loved it. Absolutely loved it. Was hooked by the dynamism of the country, by the…

innocent curiosity of people who just wanted to come up and talk and find out where you were from by the hard working ethic. All of that really attracted me and so I moved here in 2002 and I had no plan I must say and this is the story of my life Lee that I have an idea and say let’s just try this and see what happens. I moved to Vietnam saying let’s just see what happens.

Lee Wochner:
Hehehe

Michael Brosowski:
not for everybody, but I started off in Saigon, Ho Chi Minh City, and I was teaching kind of on a voluntary basis. I remember my salary was a grand old $500 a month, which was enough to get me by. And it was fun. It was good. I was teaching students who were studying economics in this very good university.

And after some time they said, look, why don’t you go to Hanoi? We have even more students in Hanoi in our class there. And so I moved here. And then look, to be really honest, at first I didn’t love Hanoi. The culture was very different to in the South. I think the cultures between North and South are a lot more similar these days, but at the time it was still quite stark.

the Northern provinces and Hanoi were very conservative compared to Southern Vietnam. So I didn’t really think I’d stay very long. And normally when you move to a city, you rent a house, you make friends, you set up a new life, but I was only going to be here for a few months. So I didn’t do all of that. And I was just living in a hotel in the old quarter of the city.

ride my bicycle to the university each day. And after work, I’d sit on the street having a meal or having a coffee and street kids would come by and offer to shine my shoes. Now I didn’t feel comfortable with that, so I would say, well I’m an English teacher, kid, sit down, you know, I’ll buy you a meal and I’ll teach you some English. I was just passing the time.

But when I got to know these kids and understand their stories, I was really blown away by it. You know, I had been very poor growing up also. Although I was born in Sydney, all of my high schooling was done in rural Australia in quite a remote area. And, you know, we lived in trailers on a block of land for some years. We didn’t even have electricity for about two years.

Michael Brosowski:
So I, you know, I understood poverty. I had experienced it. And here were these kids. It really struck me. Wow. If I’d been born in Vietnam, I probably would have been a shoeshine boy. So what could I do? You know, I, I just taught them a bit of English and I would go to university the next day and, and I would tell my class about this experience. I met these kids yesterday and I met their mothers and some of my students.

Lee Wochner:
Mm.

Michael Brosowski:
then came to me at the end of one lesson saying, hey, come on, you’re a foreigner and you’re teaching English to Vietnamese kids. We’re Vietnamese and we’re not helping anyone. So we’re going to help you. That was it. That was the message. And the particular student who said that, a young man named Chung, Pham Si Chung, he actually lives in Colorado now and he’s the president of Blue Dragon USA.

Lee Wochner:
Now!

Michael Brosowski:
But he and I co-founded Blue Dragon together. And it was all from that, from some Vietnamese university students coming to me saying, we’ve got to help as well. And once there were a few of us, it just spread like wildfire. It couldn’t stop. So that was how I went from being this teacher to setting up an organization.

Lee Wochner:
It’s a great story about how we’re all connected and how you never know what impact you’re going to make on other people You and I are having this conversation over the internet and I’m in Los Angeles and you’re in Vietnam And and so the world has only gotten more connected It’s just a fascinating time and there are opportunities to do more and more than ever before But but still the human touch let the human example of

Michael Brosowski:
Absolutely.

Lee Wochner:
you decided you’re doing something, and then your students see it and replicate the behavior. It’s very moving and it’s easily applicable.

Michael Brosowski:
Oh, totally. And now on a much larger scale, that’s the Blue Dragon story. We find over and over again that we go into a community to help, to do something. We meet a child homeless on the streets and offer them a hand. And we find other people then come around and say, let us help as well. It happens all the time. And, you know, sometimes I stand back and think,

Hey guys, you could have done this without Blue Dragon coming along. But that’s not the point, right? Sometimes we do need someone else just to take that first step. Uh, and, and then everybody wants to be part of something good. So, so it’s a beautiful part of our story.

Lee Wochner:
Well, I find you very inspiring and we’ve had guests on here week after week who inspire me. And then the people I get to work with here at Counter Intuity inspire me. And as long as you take the high road and try to set some sort of standard, others will meet you and raise that standard. And there’s no limit to what we could all achieve. So that’s a wonderful story. I love that story. So let’s…

Michael Brosowski:
And I love that you’re talking about inspiration because that’s how I think that leads well into what we’re gonna be talking about soon.

Lee Wochner:
Oh, sure.

Lee Wochner:
Well, indeed. So I think my next question for you is, we’re talking about spreading the word. It’s funny how things start little sometimes and grow big. So one of the classic business stories is Howard Schultz many years ago happened to go to Italy and saw how people were drinking coffee and what that experience was like. And you could just order a coffee and kind of hang out. And he came back to the US and…

Michael Brosowski:
Mmm.

Lee Wochner:
and asked, why aren’t we doing this? And now you have this multi-billion dollar international company called Starbucks. How do you spread the word about Blue Dragon and its work, which is essentially the sort of marketing you’re talking about made manifest through larger ways, I guess.

Michael Brosowski:
Yeah. Well, you know, if I go back to when we started 20 years ago, there was me and some university students in Vietnam. The internet was still taking off, you know. We eventually set up a website, but that was it. Like that was all we had. How could people around the world hear about us? How could anyone find out? Well, it was quite difficult.

So we said, okay, the Australian expression is heads down, bums up. Just get on with it. Just do good work and support will come. And it did. I, one of the most amazing stories of serendipity was one of the first things we did was set up a shelter for boys. It was a home for six street kids.

Lee Wochner:
I’m going to go ahead and close the video.

Michael Brosowski:
and we hired one of their mums to look after the boys. We did these calculations and it was early 2003, we said, look, we’ve got these kids, they want a home, we’ve got to get a home for them. We did our calculations, it was going to cost $5,200 a year to run this shelter. We didn’t have $5,200.

But we had these kids who wanted a home. So we said, we’ll just do it. Let’s see what happens. And I am not kidding you. Within a few weeks, I had a phone call from a wonderful woman who was living there in Hanoi. She rang me up and said, look, is this Michael? Someone gave me your number. I heard you’re working with street kids. My friends and I, we raised money for another project and it’s not going ahead.

I wonder if you have any need of $5,200?

Lee Wochner:
Hahaha!

Michael Brosowski:
Now, that doesn’t happen all the time. Uh, and we’re a bit too big to, to rely completely on serendipity like that these days, but that was the sort of thing. So it was just about, let’s do the work and support will come. Now we’re a lot bigger now. Okay. We’re reaching about 20,000 people around Vietnam. We, we can’t just start things and see, you know, hopefully the money will come. But.

Lee Wochner:
Oh, no.

Michael Brosowski:
But we still use that same ethos, do good work. That’s the first thing. And we don’t wait for the money. And when the money stops, we don’t stop. So that’s something very important about Blue Dragon. We do get funding, for example, we’ll get a grant for three years to start something. Well, at the end of three years, we can’t just stop helping people. So we’re constantly trying to get the message out, trying to raise money, so that it doesn’t matter if the money stops. We can still keep going. Now we rely, of course, on all of our Facebook, our Twitter, I’m still gonna call it Twitter, all of our social media. We have these great support groups that are all voluntary in other countries. All of our staff are here in Vietnam, everyone around the world helping out.

Michael Brosowski:
is doing it on a voluntary basis. And I travel a bit, I head to the US every year or so and to Europe and to Australia to meet people, to talk, to share stories. So the first thing is just doing good work. And the second thing is telling the stories, sharing the hope. And our motto, by the way, when it comes to raising money, what we say to ourselves is inspire the world to give. It’s about Michael Brosowski:
I totally agree. By the way, what we’re talking about really applies to the kids at Blue Dragon as well. You know, we work with some kids who come from pretty rough backgrounds or have sometimes done some terrible things. We meet street kids, for example, who’ve stolen all of their mother’s belongings and run away, or kids who’ve gotten into terrible fights and been in and out of prison. But what we say to ourselves is…

We will get out of these kids exactly what we expect. If we expect them to be bad, they’re going to be bad, guaranteed. If we expect them to be good, they will be good. And it happens 100% of the time, and it’s the same with how we work with the global community. We put it out there that here’s this possibility of saving a life, of ending human trafficking.

Lee Wochner:
That’s right.

Michael Brosowski:
of giving someone a chance to start over. And people rise to that occasion. Ultimately, people want to do good and to be good. We wanna have an impact on the world. And I think if we can’t find a way to do that positively, we end up doing it negatively. So give people what they need, a chance to help. Everyone wants to contribute.

Lee Wochner:
Everyone wants to lead a life of meaning. Everyone wants to make an impact. And the people who feel otherwise are horribly damaged people who, I try not to give up on them, you know? And I don’t let them drag me down. So, nonprofit management can be difficult. And whether it’s nonprofit, a public agency, whatever sort of endeavor, it’s important to recognize success.

and to celebrate it. I’ll give you an example. One of the nonprofit boards I’m on, we had our meeting last night. It was, no, Monday night. Anyway, it was last night or the night before. That’s how, that gives you a reflection of my schedule. And I listened to everything and things are being kind of moderately conveyed. Well, we did this and we did that, and we did this and we did that. And so I asked for a piece of paper, because I don’t know why that I didn’t have one. Usually I have a piece of paper. And I started making notes.

And then I asked the board chair if I could have a minute at the end of the meeting. And so he said, sure, here, have a minute. And I said, let me read back to you everything I heard. We did this and we did this and we did this and we did this and we, I mean, it’s just, it was a catalog of success that no one was feeling because it’s hard sometimes to run a nonprofit, but no one had recognized and communicated the success. And you could feel the difference in the room when someone…

was reading a list of all of the incredible triumphs just in the past couple of months and particularly over the last year and coming out of a pandemic. So, you know, when I listened to you, I mean, right off the bat, in 2005, you rescued a trafficked child. In 07, you went to rescue one girl and wound up with six. You’re helping 20,000 different people. You’ve had all sorts of success and people want to be associated with success and want to solve problems.

You have to tell that story to engage them and to get them to support you.

Michael Brosowski:
Totally, totally. People want, I like the way you said it there, people want to identify with success. Um, and look in nonprofits, I think your experience is, is probably very, very typical blue dragon, we do it as well. We, we will save someone’s life and then move straight onto, okay, what’s the next thing that we have to do? Um, and we are, we are this year. We are consciously.

Lee Wochner:
Mm-hmm.

Lee Wochner:
Hahaha

Michael Brosowski:
saying to ourselves, we actually need to celebrate what we’re doing. Not for ego. But there are lots of reasons to celebrate success, including the fact that also in nonprofits, apart from all of the success that we might have, like you say, it is really hard. There’s never enough money. There’s never enough people, staff, volunteers.

always so many more things that you can do that you’ll never get to. And so you can go home at the end of the day. The organization can have had a wonderfully successful day and you go home feeling tired and burnt out. That’s not right. And whether it’s non-profit or for-profit actually, no one should live their life like that. We need to recognize the…

Lee Wochner:
Mm-hmm.

Michael Brosowski:
and celebrate it. I love that you raised this point. I think it’s so important to humanity, not only to organizations.

Lee Wochner:
I just couldn’t agree more. So let’s ask some tactical questions about what people can do. So human trafficking is an international menace. How can one recognize if someone is being trafficked? That you’re in a big city or you’re on a plane, you’re in a bus terminal, there’s a person trying to, a young person trying to sell you flowers or something. How can you identify the signs of

of human trafficking and is there anything you should do?

Michael Brosowski:
Yeah, now every country has their own system for reporting a concern, for raising your voice. I know in the US there are some fantastic nonprofits and government services as well to make a call, you know, raise a concern. It is difficult and I want to say straight away that I, in a way it’s unfair that the burden of discovering human trafficking falls on

Lee Wochner:
Mm-hmm.

Michael Brosowski:
the average woman and man walking down the street. But that’s how life is, unfortunately. And so it is helpful to be aware. And I think what you’re looking for is exactly what I saw in the Boingoc nearly 20 years ago. Someone who clearly doesn’t wanna be where they are, but doesn’t appear to have a choice. And talking to them.

Lee Wochner:
Mm-hmm.

Michael Brosowski:
asking them in a friendly way. You know, those sort of signs on the airport door, one reason that they’re so clever is that when you’re in that bathroom, you are on your own. You know, surely at that point, there’s no one watching what you do. If you’re talking to someone who you think is being exploited, be aware that they might have someone watching them and you might not realize it, or they may have no idea who you are and be unwilling to trust you.

So even when somebody says, no, look, I’m fine. If you really have a reason to be concerned, give them your number. One thing that bars do in some places is they have a code word that a woman can say to a bar staff, I’m feeling blue, or there’ll be some expression that lets the…

The bar person, no, okay, this person’s in trouble. I’m gonna help them. See if there’s a way that you can offer help without it having to be immediate. Give them a phone number that they can call if they need to.

Michael Brosowski:
Do make the call if you’re concerned. Don’t leave a situation where someone’s being potentially harmed and do nothing.

Lee Wochner:
Michael, what’s the best way for people to reach out to you or to Blue Dragon, learn more and possibly get involved?

Michael Brosowski:
You just head to the website, bluedragon.org. You can contact us through there. Of course, we’re all over social media because telling our story is so important. And you can reach us through all of our social media channels as well. We are always looking for new support and there are opportunities to get involved. For example, in the US, we have our board of Blue Dragon USA, people who want to get active on that or hold an event, absolutely are very welcome.

Lee Wochner:
If there’s one thing that you hope people take away from this conversation, what would it be?

Michael Brosowski:
That there’s hope that you can make change in the world. You know, you can look out, you can, my goodness, you turn on the news and just see what’s happening there, or you can look out your window and feel very depressed. But it doesn’t have to be like that. Because within all of us, there’s good. And there is so much reason to hope that helping another person makes a difference.

So start, start with one person. Don’t feel you have to go out and start an organization and move to another country. Just help the person next door. Help the woman next door who’s raising kids on her own and sometimes needs a break. Take a meal to the elderly person’s home. Go and visit the rescue dog shelter and volunteer there. Doing those things, that’s your reason for hope you can make a difference.

Lee Wochner:
Thank you very much. Michael Brosowski, very nice to meet you, to get to talk to you and hear about these inspiring stories of rescuing people from human slavery. Thank you so much.

Michael Brosowski:
It’s been a delight Lee. Thank you.

Jaclyn Uloth:
Thanks for listening! We’re glad you came. That’s What C! Said is produced by Lisa Pham and engineered by Joe Curet. It’s available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. Please like and follow the show. Visit Counterintuity.com to sign up and learn more.