Trafficking awareness event comes to Friendship Centre

Dozens of Fort Erie residents gathered at the Fort Erie Native Friendship Centre on Wednesday for a community workshop on human trafficking, part of a three-city outreach initiative targeting border communities across Ontario identified as areas of elevated risk.

The event arrived against a backdrop of rising trafficking numbers in the region. Niagara Regional Police identified 48 human trafficking victims in 2024, a 700 per cent increase from six the year prior, and worked 159 trafficking investigations that year alone. Of those victims identified in 2024 and 2025, 19 were under 18.

The Association of Native Child and Family Service Agencies of Ontario (ANCFSAO) co-produced the event alongside the Ontario Association of Children’s Aid Societies (OACAS), with the Fort Erie Native Friendship Centre hosting.

Fort Erie was chosen alongside Sarnia and Sault Ste. Marie because each sits on the U.S. border. The group held an event in Sarnia the day before and will travel to Sault Ste. Marie this week.

Caitlin Lickers, an event co-ordinator with ANCFSAO, told Fort Erie Radio the organization had spent prior years training agency workers and service providers, and turned this year toward raising awareness in the community.

“Sometimes accessing a service can be a barrier in itself because you do not know people and it is a new space,” said Lickers.

The evening was designed to lower that barrier. Rather than a lecture, organizers built the programming around hands-on activities: cookie-making, keychain crafting with a strawberry heart teaching, a photo booth, and an affirmation wall.

Tables around the room held local service providers, not all of them trafficking-specific, so that families could make connections before they needed them.

Jasmine Manning, a community worker with the Friendship Centre, told Fort Erie Radio that relationship-building was the foundation of the night. Each event in the three-city series included local resources so attendees could make connections with service providers in their own area.

“It is important to have conversations and it is important to build relationships,” said Manning.

Koda Jacobs, a youth leadership member with ANCFSAO who also planned the event, said the informal setting was deliberate.

“Food brings people together, and having that shared space makes it easier to talk about something that is heavy,” said Jacobs.

The programming priorities, including online safety, confidence building and gaming-related risks, came directly from youth councils with both ANCFSAO and OACAS, who shaped the event during planning sessions held earlier in the year.

Jaden Hardie Bardy, the youth engagement lead with ANCFSAO, said the difficulty of the conversation runs deeper than discomfort.

“It does not seem like an actual reality that can be faced within our own communities and families, and that makes it even harder to start the conversation,” said Hardie Bardy. “It is about caregivers stepping into spaces where they can learn, so they can bring that knowledge back and have safe conversations with their children.”

Julie Buckshot, a staff member at the Friendship Centre, told Fort Erie Radio she has encountered trafficking cases through her work with local families in Fort Erie, including situations where victims did not initially understand that they had been trafficked.

“It is not only a stranger that can do this to you, it could be your boyfriend or your husband, and some people do not even realize it happened to them,” said Buckshot.

That gap between perception and reality is well-documented. The Canadian Centre to End Human Trafficking notes that traffickers rely more heavily on psychological control, manipulation and isolation than on physical confinement, a pattern that makes trafficking difficult for both victims and bystanders to identify.

The Canadian Human Trafficking Hotline received more than 5,100 calls in 2024, an all-time high.

Fort Erie is one of the few communities targeted by ANCFSAO where the organization has no member agency. To hold the event, organizers co-ordinated with Family and Children’s Services Niagara and the Friendship Centre directly.

Lickers framed the event as a community responsibility, not a narrowly Indigenous one.

“At the end of the day, we are all living in this space together, and we need to combat these issues together,” said Lickers.

Mini-workshops ran throughout the evening, covering healthy relationships, social media safety and how to adjust privacy settings on common apps. Attendees received workbooks with statistics, warning signs and local resources.

The Friendship Centre indicated the March 25 event was a first of its kind at the venue, and Buckshot expressed hope that similar programming would return next year.

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