Pictured above: Team members from Poiema’s Frisco campus at Stonebriar Community Church

Hello Poiema family,

Happy New Year! As January marks National Human Trafficking Awareness Month, we’re especially grateful for your partnership in helping protect vulnerable children and families.

As we step into 2026, we’re excited to share some powerful updates with you. We closed out the year with 18 outreach campuses across North Texas—plus one in Easley, South Carolina—and we’re already preparing to launch another campus this spring. Across many of the communities our teams visited, we were encouraged by the willingness of businesses to display missing kids’ posters and take part in helping keep children safe.

Since our last update in September, our volunteers have distributed more than 1,500 missing kids’ posters to businesses along our outreach routes. Additionally, volunteers spent dozens of hours gathering critical intel on suspicious activity connected to potential trafficking situations. Our strategic partners, 4TheOne, investigated the information.

Keep reading below to hear more about this intel, see additional updates, and learn how many children were recovered just last month!
Our volunteers who serve on outreach have a profound impact on their communities. This is evident by the responses from hotel and gas station personnel. Many who received our posters recognized at least one of the missing children. Because of our volunteers sacrificial service, people now have a heightened awareness to view their neighborhood in a new light, recognizing that human trafficking could be happening in their own backyard.

One hotel manager shared that a young girl, accompanied by some older men, entered the lobby of his hotel. She attempted to book a room, but his staff refused to do so because of her age. The manager couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong—though he wasn’t sure why. Not long after this incident, Poiema volunteers arrived with a missing kids poster and information about the signs of human trafficking. The timing was striking. The hotel manager expressed deep gratitude and even offered to share security footage with 4TheOne in hopes of locating and recovering the young girl.

Poiema’s teams received many other reports during recent outreach efforts. Here are just a few:

• A Cleburne hotel clerk recognized S. Schmitt along with two other girls from previous months’ posters and is concerned they are being trafficked in a specific Fort Worth area.
• Carrollton volunteers reported seeing a vulnerable young woman at a hotel handing over money to a man. The same man was then seen at another hotel.
• A Lewisville hotel clerk identified N. Rossainz from a poster.
• Reports near Dallas DART SW Medical/Parkland area, said that Mercedeis was frequently seen in the area and the information suggested her involvement in dangerous activity.
• A Mansfield gas station clerk reported seeing N. Vargas with three boys. This sighting occurred just two hours before the clerk spoke with our volunteers.
• In December, SEVEN out of the fifteen children on our missing kids’ posters were recovered! Please continue to lift them up in prayer.

These moments matter. Each conversation, poster, and trained set of eyes brings us closer to protecting vulnerable children and interrupting trafficking in real time. Thank you for standing with us and making this life-saving work possible.

*If your church or community is interested in learning more about human trafficking awareness, or if you are interested in launching an outreach campus, we’d love to hear from you! Please reach out to our Education and Outreach Director, Natalie Alonzo at natalie@poiemafoundation.org.