The Key Club and broadcasting teacher Seth Stratford have partnered up to support the non-profit that Stratford helped start up, Rescue Our Children. The Key Club is selling shirts and wristbands to raise awareness about child sex trafficking to benefit the cause. The money goes through Rescueourchildren.org to ultimately give to Operation Underground Railroad.

“I was in a entrepreneurship and inventive creation class in my grad program in JMU. We had to start a non-profit where all the proceeds would go to a non-profit or a charity of our choosing. Part of it too, was that we had to sell a product,” Stratford said.
The Rescue Our children website donates money directly to Operation Underground Railroad, which Stratford found out about before the project.

“My wife saw on a Facebook post an article written by the student newspaper at Brigham Young University about Operation Underground railroad, which was started by another student who attended that school and that’s where we found out about it,” Stratford said.
Operation Underground Railroad was founded by Tim Ballard who originally helped the U.S. government in rescuing sex trafficked children. Ballard was frustrated that some children didn’t fall into his jurisdiction, so he started Operation Underground Railroad to help local governments set up sting operations to catch child predators.

“They [Operation Underground Railroad] present themselves as possible buyers of the kids and they have cameras all set up to record the whole thing. And when the deal is done the local authorities come in and arrest everybody including them to protect their identity so they can keep doing it. Then they take the kids and they place them in a local government sponsored approved facility that help rehabilitate them and the organization helps pay for that,” Stratford said.

Rescue Our Children is an entirely homegrown organization by Stratford and his JMU classmates. They came up with the name Rescue Our Children because the URL was available and it communicates what they’re about.

“Later on I think it really works out. A lot of these kids are kidnapped from their families or orphans or they’re runaways. A lot of them, there’s nobody looking for them so if you believe that we’re all part of a human family, these are our children,” Stratford said.

Stratford knew that he wanted to partner with Maurizio Antonnicola and the Key Club because the Key Club has done many fundraisers in the past.

“I ran into Mr. A here at the school and pitched the idea to him and he said he’d talk to the officers. Then we met with them after that, and explained the organization. And we showed the website and the videos on the website and they weren’t hard to convince that this was a worthy cause,” Stratford said.

Antonnicola and the Key Club are trying to raise $2000 for the cause.

“We’re trying to raise $2000 maybe four [$4000] to save one or two children from sex slavery through the Operation Underground Railroad Organization,” Antonnicola said.

So far, the Key Club has sold almost 100 t-shirts and 200 wristbands.

“We had to order 25 more black shirts and that’s probably all that’s left. They’ve sold most of our shirts. We’ve sold some ourselves to people we know. Most of the sales have been through key club,” Stratford said.
The Key Club is trying to sell as much as they possibly can.

“We’re selling our stuff as cheaply as we can because besides raising money we are also trying to bring awareness to this situation,” Antonnicola said.

The goals that Stratford had of raising awareness and money have mostly been realized.

“We designed the shirts and wristbands to raise awareness and some of what people pay for the shirts and wristbands goes to Operation Underground Railroad so it encompasses both goals. I’m really happy with what Key Club has done,” Stratford said.
Stratford is still looking to expand the project.

“Next week we’ll be meeting with the president of the sorority council at JMU to see if they want to get involved as well, start another partnership. See what they can do,” Stratford said. Stratford’s class that the idea was originally for has ended but he hope to continue Rescue Our Children.

“I wanna see how far we can go with this, how much money we can raise, how much awareness we can raise, just because it’s a worthy cause. There’s too many kids out there that need us,” Stratford said.