Polaris Project's vision is for a world without slavery. Named after the North Star that guided slaves towards freedom along the Underground Railroad, Polaris Project was founded by two university students in Providence, Rhode Island with a mission to eliminate the modern slave trade. In August of 2004, Polaris Japan was established with the help of the Japanese staff, and today has a network of over 1500 members, volunteers, and campaign activists.

Polaris Project is one of the largest anti-trafficking organizations in the United States and Japan, with programs operating at international, national and local levels through our offices in Washington, DC; Newark, NJ; and Tokyo, Japan. Polaris Project is one of the few organizations working on all forms of trafficking and serving both citizen and foreign national victims of human trafficking, and provides a comprehensive approach to combating modern-day slavery.

Polaris Project Japan's comprehensive approach to combating human trafficking includes victim support and aid, operating the help hotline, advocating for stronger anti-trafficking legislation, and engaging community members in local and national awareness campaigns.

Polaris Project was founded in 2002 by Katherine Chon and Derek Ellerman while they were in their senior year at Brown University. During a typical dinner conversation with friends one evening in the fall of 2001, the two discussed the history of slavery in the U.S. and the challenges and successes of the abolitionist movement. The conversation led to questions about how slavery still exists around the world in modern times. Because Katherine and Derek hadn't ever learned in-depth about the issue of human trafficking before that initial conversation, they were both shocked to read about estimates of the scope and prevalence of modern-day slavery when they went home to their dorm rooms that night to do research on the Internet.

What started as an initial curiosity between two friends soon turned to a recognition that the issue of human trafficking still had not reached the mainstream public consciousness of communities nationwide by 2002. Quizzing classmates, friends, family members, and professors confirmed for Katherine and Derek that although people were well-learned about forms of slavery in the past, they were, on average, largely uninformed and unaware about human trafficking and modern-day slavery in the present day.

Katherine and Derek's growing interest and passion about the issue soon began to spread to friends and classmates at Brown. It was in the middle of such growing fervor when Katherine and Derek discovered a local newspaper article about the arrest and deportation of six Asian women who were trafficked into a commercially-fronted brothel just a few miles away from their college apartments in Providence, Rhode Island. The article hit home and served as a catalyst for Katherine and Derek to resolve to take action as it explained how the women lived in slave-like conditions, were unable to leave, and had cigar burns on their arms.

Katherine and Derek started their efforts by searching for ways that average community members could take action against human trafficking and modern-day slavery. After all, they weren't doctors or lawyers, and they weren't law enforcement officers, government officials, or policy-makers. They wondered, "What could two seniors getting their undergraduate degrees really do to make a difference on this issue?" 

After finding few options for community members to do something meaningful, the two college friends decided to start up their own non-profit organization that would be exclusively dedicated to the issue of human trafficking and modern-day slavery. Their vision for the organization was for it to be a place that would empower grassroots community members to build a movement to fight trafficking and slavery, similar to a modern-day version of the Underground Railroad. The success of the Underground Railroad of the past was based on ordinary everyday people doing extraordinary things, and it was in this spirit that Katherine and Derek decided to name the organization Polaris Project after the North Star, Polaris, that guided slaves to freedom.

Katherine and Derek officially launched Polaris Project on V-Day, February 14, 2002, and after considerable research and forethought, entered a business plan into an annual entrepreneurship competition at Brown. Although it was unusual for a non-profit proposal to be competitive, the two won second place and a small monetary prize to support start-up costs. With a growing team of interested students and professors, Katherine and Derek's first idea for a concrete program was to launch a research, education, and activism portal on the Web that would serve as a centralized clearinghouse of resources on human trafficking for the nascent field. It was then that Polaris Project's first program, HumanTrafficking.com, was launched in the Spring of 2002 with a team of over 25 student researchers and 2 faculty advisors supporting its development.

The day after graduation, Katherine and Derek packed up a U-Haul truck to relocate their lives to Washington, DC to launch Polaris Project's first office. Without a concrete roadmap or recipe to help Polaris Project make an impact, much of the organization's early work involved experimentation, innovation, and trying out new ideas and strategies. Katherine and Derek's initial core efforts focused on figuring out new ways to find trafficking victims, to learn about trafficking networks through field research, to explore building relationships with law enforcement, to try to link victims with services through referrals, and to get more community members to care about the issue and take action.

In the following years, the organization gained momentum as more and more people joined to dedicate their time, skills, talents, passions, and ideas. Polaris Project also branched out into new areas and its leadership came to understand the importance of combating the issue using a comprehensive approach that combined a set of inter-related strategies. These strategies evolved over time but grew to include victim outreach and identification, victim services and protection, policy advocacy, training and technical assistance, developing future leaders, and building a movement through grassroots community mobilization.

Polaris Project celebrated its five-year anniversary in February 2007 as an organization that had become a widely recognized name in the anti-trafficking movement and has grown to a professional staff of over 30, with five local offices in the United States and Japan. Its staff, fellows, volunteers, partners, and supporters are all joined together in the spirit of a modern-day Underground Railroad, where community members from all walks of life can each take a stand to support the collective overall vision for a world without slavery.