The ACU Red Thread Movement is expanding its student interaction on campus this semester by starting a book club.
“We’re going to be reading a book called Inside the Business of Trafficking and it’s going to take a look at the business side of it,” Moses said. “It’s a really cool opportunity for students to learn why people sell other human beings because it’s really easy to say, ‘Oh that’s really awful; no one should sell someone else for sex,’ but then you look at it from a business standpoint, and there are reasons it’s still in practice today and is one of the largest growing industries.”
The book club will meet once every two weeks and is free as the Honors College who will be providing all of the books.
ACU Red Thread Movement started in 2009 when two students sought out to find a way to help trafficking victims in Nepal. Brittany Partridge and Samantha Sutherland, now graduates of ACU, teamed up with Red Thread, a branch of Eternal Threads, to create a movement in which students would sell red bracelets made by women in Nepal. All profit from the bracelets would go back to those women to keep them out of poverty and trafficking.
Red Thread is a sub-division of Eternal Threads, a non-profit organization that aims to help women who are at risk to be trafficked or exploited.
“Eternal Threads has an open house in Abilene where they sell products from all over the world,” said Abbey Moses, junior pre-law political science major from McKinney and president of ACU Red Thread Movement. “They have amazing products from places like Afghanistan, Nepal, India, places in South America, you name it. They are a Fair Trade organization, and they work to empower women across the globe to provide for their families and create sustainable economies with local communities.”
Red Thread has a long tradition of working with ACU. Red Thread does no longer works with Eternal Threads directly, but still maintains a close relationship to their parent organization.
“Officially, we are a student group of the Red Thread initiative of Eternal Threads,” said Ryan Clements, senior biblical text major from Azle and officer of the ACU Red Thread Movement. “Because it was founded by ACU students, it’s a little different, but we’re just like any other social justice group on campus.”
