LifeWay Network was founded by Sister of Charity Joan Dawber to combat human trafficking. The organization was granted nonprofit status on March 14, 2007, but the call to serve survivors goes back even further.

In February 2002, a letter from Sister Mary Louise Brink, the leader of the Sisters of Charity, Halifax, invited the members of her congregation to “enter into a day of prayer and fasting for exploited women and children around the world” as their observance of the March 8 International Women’s Day. 

Sister Mary Lou had just come from Rome, where she had attended a meeting of the International Union of Superiors General, representing religious sisters from every continent. During the meeting, leaders described the phenomenon of human trafficking that was being unmasked by their members working at the grassroots level in impoverished areas. 

When she first read that letter, Sister Joan Dawber was working as a pastoral associate in St. Michael Church in Flushing, NY, where parishioners form a microcosm of the globe. Joan embraced the spiritual practice that characterizes religious sisters: It turns toward, not away from, a suffering world. Sister Joan had been praying for victims of torture, not clear about what action it would require. 

The call was furthered when Sister Joan’s friend and coworker at St. Michael’s Church, the Rev. Edward Wetterer, handed her an article from the January 2004 issue of the New York Times Magazine titled “The Girls Next Door,” by investigative journalist Peter Landesman. In it, he describes the horrific tale of girls being sold for sex in an open market. Men buy ten minutes of time with each girl for sexual activity; girls service them one after the other, and the men must pay extra if they use up more than ten minutes. In the fall of that year, Landesman’s name caught Sister Joan’s attention again. He was to be the keynote speaker at a daylong conference on how to recognize the signs of trafficking. Together these experiences crystallized her decision to pursue more information about human trafficking and to find others who wished to respond.

February 2005 brought the issue closer to home. Sister Joan heard of an anti-trafficking training session set up by the New York Asian Women’s Center (now Womankind) and NYC Community Response to Trafficking. They presented facts and figures about trafficking in the New York metropolitan area. Joan recalls the fear she felt setting out for the meeting. But listening to information about persons who were suffering in the New York City area, Sister Joan had an idea. It would be several years and many workshops later before Sister Joan quit her job and plunged into full-time work “collaborating to combat human trafficking.” But it would be the guiding inspiration of the next several years’ work. 

2009: LifeWay Network began offering short-term emergency stays to survivors of human trafficking.

2012: We began operating long-term transitional safe houses.

Sister Joan was interviewed on the podcast “In Good Faith” about her call to found LifeWay Network. Click the link above to hear her story in her own words.