WHO WE ARE

For a woman who has experienced the unthinkable, the effects of trauma can be completely debilitating, preventing her from maintaining healthy relationships, holding a job, functioning as a wife or mother, or living a full, productive life. In many cases, professional trauma therapy is the only way to untangle all the complex, involuntarily emotional responses triggered by the tragedy of sexual trauma.



However, trauma therapy is costly. Individual sessions with an experienced trauma therapist are typically a hundred dollars or more, done on a weekly or biweekly schedule. And it can take years of therapy to work through all the layers of trauma responses a victim may be experiencing, depending on the degree and complexity of the trauma. For a woman without insurance or significant resources, getting the help she needs to heal from her trauma can be completely out of her reach.

This is where Set Free Foundation can help. Women who need therapy to heal from sexual trauma from human trafficking, sexual assault, abuse or exploitation but can not afford it, can find a therapist they are comfortable with and the therapist can apply to Set Free Foundation for funding for their client. The therapist bills Set Free for the sessions. Funding is provided for a specific number of sessions based on available resources. And funding for additional sessions can be requested when current sessions are completed.

Hello, I’m Skip Orth founder of Set Free Foundation. To some people, it may seem a little odd that the founder of an organization that specifically serves women, would not be a woman. So let me explain to you why I started Set Free Foundation.

In the early 2010s I discovered the existence of the sex industry and human trafficking by watching a random documentary. This documentary demonstrated how vulnerable women are lured into the sex industry, trapped there and endure unimaginable violence and abuse. This film made such an impact on me that I was compelled to dig deeper to better understand how it was possible for something so evil to exist. I read several books written by sex industry survivors, I spoke with sex industry survivors individually, I looked into anti-human trafficking organizations to find statistics and looked into organizations that served survivors. All this information also lead me into the study of trauma and mental health as it relates to sexual trauma survivors.

Then, on October 15, 2017 the #MeToo movement went viral with Facebook reporting over 12 million reactions in 24 hours connected to #MeToo. For the first time, as women stepped forward to acknowledge the sexual trauma they had experienced, it started to become apparent how saturated our society had become with rape and sexual violence. Around this same time, I was at an evening church service, listening to a female guest speaker. At one point in the service, the speaker asked for any women who were there that evening, who needed prayer and healing for sexual abuse to raise their hand. Hands went up all around me. I would estimate well over half the women in the room raised their hands. It’s hard to describe how seeing all those hands go up made me feel. Here were a significant group of women, many of whom I knew and interacted with, acknowledging the hurt they carried in their lives from some type of past sexual trauma.

After all I had seen and learned, I was compelled to do something to make a difference in the lives of women who were living with the affects of the trauma they had experienced. It’s my personal conviction that men should be actively involved in helping women find freedom and healing from sexual trauma because, in the vast majority of cases, men are the ones who caused it. That is why I started Set Free Foundation.