Content advisory: this conversation includes direct description of child sex trafficking.Dawn Manske is the founder of Made for Freedom, a St. Louis based for-profit social enterprise that sells apparel, jewellery, home decor, bath and body products, baby gear and coffee made by survivors of human trafficking and people coming out of marginalized situations. She also chairs the board of its nonprofit arm, the Made for Freedom Foundation, a 501(c)(3) that funds educational and career training scholarships for the same populations. Made for Freedom works with roughly twenty partner centres worldwide that handle rescue, safe housing, life skills training and manufacturing, measures its results in hours of dignified employment rather than dollars raised, and is an Arch Grants recipient.In this conversation with Caleb Pedosiuk, Dawn considers the nonprofit and for-profit models for a social enterprise built to combat human trafficking, and explains why she built a for-profit, after asking everyone she could find and getting the answer twice over. The operator closest to her business had started as a nonprofit and had to shut it down, and Dawn is blunt about the assumption the label creates: money does not land in your lap. She walks through how the model actually works, twenty centres doing the rescue and the training and the making, and Made for Freedom curating, warehousing and shipping into a market where professional women have few options that carry a story. She tells the story the episode is named for, a girl in the back of a safe house in India whose family would not take her back, and the standard she gave her team in that room. Asked what she needs most to grow, she names corporate relationships, companies that already buy gifts and companies that want to be in the fight.Dawn is exactly the kind of founder, innovator, and problem solver this series exists to put a light on. She took the thing most people would rather not think about and built a business that pays people for their work instead of asking the world for sympathy. Authority is earned by building things worth talking about, and an honest account of that work is what makes a brand understood, trusted, and findable by the systems people now ask for answers.Learn more about Made for Freedom: https://madeforfreedom.comMade for Freedom Foundation: https://www.madeforfreedomfoundation.orgDawn Manske on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dawnmanske/What We Need to Grow is Caleb Pedosiuk's founder conversation series from 79 Development, on growth, judgment, and the thinking behind building great companies. It exists to shine a light on the founders, innovators, problem solvers, and pioneers building things that matter.Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5O6IiwVl4tHyhegQafVZLaPodcast sponsored by 79 Development Inc | 79dev.com#socialenterprise #endhumantrafficking #corporategifting #impactsourcing #ethicalfashion #nonprofit #founders #podcast