We, here at FourKites, are excited to announce our partnership with Truckers Against Trafficking! Truckers Against Trafficking (TAT) educates truckers and other persons working in transportation spaces about the prevalence of human trafficking and how to identify victims along their routes. Additionally, TAT provides resources for truckers to report suspicious events. It is estimated that hundreds of thousands of people (with higher rates of women and children) are currently victims of human trafficking in the United States alone, with global numbers reaching over 40 million people.
The FourKites Women’s Group is always looking for opportunities to give back to our community, and we all agreed that a partnership with TAT was the perfect opportunity to spread awareness of the organization’s critical mission. After approaching members of our executive team to gauge their thoughts on the partnership, they overwhelmingly supported this initiative and gave me the go-ahead to run with it! From our CEO, Matt Elenjickal, to our product team, the entire organization supported our vision and helped make this partnership a reality. I’m so grateful to work for a company that empowers its employees to take initiative and make a difference.
Every day, we work with carriers to provide our mutual shipper customers with real-time visibility. We brought this same mindset as we sought to develop an effective tool to help drivers more easily report suspicious activity that they might encounter along their routes. Our vision was to offer easy access to the National Human Trafficking Hotline (NHTH) directly from CarrierLink, an app designed to help drivers improve tracking quality and optimize the delivery process. Our mission is to increase momentum and awareness of TAT’s efforts to the hundreds of thousands of drivers who use CarrierLink every day. Those same drivers now have the ability to swiftly report signs of human trafficking directly through the app.
To date, more than 2,250 calls have been made by truck drivers to the NHTH, resulting in the identification of 612 cases of trafficking and more than 1,100 victims, along with countless calls made to 911 to report human trafficking emergencies. These numbers speak to the importance of truck drivers as watchdogs against human trafficking, and we at FourKites consider ourselves lucky to partner with them.
If you are a CarrierLink user, please download the latest version of the CarrierLink app to access the new Truckers Against Trafficking feature. And we encourage everyone – FourKites user or not – to become TAT-trained. Each and every one of us can make a difference. Click here to learn more about Truckers Against Trafficking.