EP. 26: Jillian Penhale | Created Women, Director

Jillian and I chat about the work she does with the non-profit Created to come alongside women in the sex industry.  

4:06 Jillian shares what Created does on a day to day basis to build relationships with women coming out of the sex industry

Created’s goal is to provide a place of belonging and refuge to every woman they meet that is coming from the sex industry.

5 of the 9 staff at Created Women are survivor leaders.

7:37 Jillian shares some statistics about the sex industry, particularly in Tampa, Florida where they are located

• Tampa is 3rd in the U.S. for the number of men, women, and children who are brought into the country for sex trafficking
• Tampa has more strip clubs per capita than any other city in the U.S.
• Tampa is 3rd in the U.S. for illicit massage parlors

10:49 “Think about, what are the things that happened in their lives that led them here, because no child is ever like that is what I want to do when I grow up. That’s how I want to make my way through college is to dance and strip…It is not a normal thing. It has to come from some brokenness that is happening, whether to them or around them.”

11:50 Jillian walks us through her time as a street outreach volunteer, residential program coordinator, and now executive director at Created.

17:58 “So many times we go into ministry like, ‘Oh, this is going to be so great’….but real ministry is hard. People are broken and they don’t want your help and they don’t want your good words or whatever you think you can give. At the end of the day, that is the biggest thing I have had to learn, all I can offer is Jesus and the kindness and peace that He brings.”

20:20 Jillian shares obstacles and success stories 

27:07 “We have 5 members of our staff team are graduates of our program.  To watch them every day reinvest their lives into the women we’re serving and use their stories to cultivate change that nobody else could is amazing.”

“It’s all the small moments that really matter. The graduating from drug treatment, starting trauma therapy; it is all the small steps, because  even when a relapse happens or something happens and a woman decides to leave our program we can always go back and think, ‘She made it this many months clean this time and she made through these classes and life skills that she never had before.’ The likelihood of her coming back from that relapse is so much higher than it was before.”

SHOW NOTES continued.

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