Not For Sale

Name: Laura Aguirre
Role: Coordinator
Contact: laguirre.usf@gmail.com

A Note from Laura:

Hello! My name is Laura Aguirre and I am a member of the Erasmus Living-Learning community 2006-2007 at the University of San Francisco. I’m a Politics major with Legal Studies and Public Service Honors minors. I’m from San Jose, CA and while I’m still deciding what it is I want to do in life, I hope to participate in the USF in D.C. program and stay as involved as possible. I’m also currently the Vice President of Events for USF Politics Society and Pi Sigma Alpha. Through this position and my work in Erasmus, I hope that we are able to increase awareness and involvement on campus this semester through exciting, relevant events and discussion of current topics. I love to work for social justice in any way I can, especially in conjunction with USF’s motto of “Educating minds and hearts to change the world.”

My role in the Erasmus Not for Sale Campaign and modern-day slavery research project is the Coordinator. I schedule interviews and organize the researchers, interviewers, and members of the film team. I also work with Devon Davey, the Documenter, to try to keep general organization of the group. I’m excited to work with our whole team to not only learn more about human trafficking and slavery in San Francisco, but to be the first group to track and document our findings.

Laura’s Weekly Updates:

04.05.07 – 04.12.07

I haven’t been debriefed on the interviews yet, but it sounds like all went well and we’re making quite a bit of progress.  We’re also working hard to look into different organizations that appear to be brothels and that are appearing more and more to look like the “workers” could be trafficked.  Through the mayor’s office (treasurer) I was able to notice that a couple of these “businesses” don’t have licenses with the city, which is a tip off.  Hopefully with the help of SAGE we can dig deeper into these.  I’m also finishing up the PR cards for our Not for Sale Day event, difficult now that we’ve run into some administrative difficulties and can no longer declare ourselves and Abolitionist University…but we strive on!

 03.29.07 – 04.05.07
This week we have/had three interviews, Kathleen Kim of Stanford Immigration Clinic, Norma Hotaling of SAGE, and Dolores Donovan of  USF Law School.  I also received some great new contacts from two of our researchers which I will be entering into our contact database and be sending out initial interview request emails.  These organizations include domestic and international shelters, coalitions, alliances, and funds.  It might be beneficial to work with the researchers and interviewers to select who we want to interview and why to make sure we are answering specific questions with these interviews as we come to the close of the semester.  This weekend, I need to call possible interviewees that have already been emailed and called once again to follow up.  I have also been working on designing the PR cards for our event on

April 26…03.15.07 – 03.22.07 It’s been a little difficult to get some solid work completed since my last posting because it was Spring Break! I ended up just staying here at USF and relaxing (for once!)   I was able to finally set up an interview with Meredith May from the SF Chronicle, which I hear was a great success! (See blog postings of Mel, Maya, Tini, and Angelica for more info.)  I also sent initiations to groups like Global Exchange, Narika, the Polaris Project, Asian Pacific Islander Legal Outreach, and many more for interviews!!! I hope to hear back from them soon!   We are also in the process of finalizing the interview with Connie De La Vega of USF and Norma Hotaling of SAGE….check back to hear more over the upcoming weeks!