Believe Me

Andrea Powell is the Executive Director of Karana Rising where she supports advocacy and care for survivors of sex trafficking whose own trafficking led to their arrest and incarceration.. For the past 18 years, she has led national and international efforts to develop services, housing, and policies to advance the rights and healing of survivors of human trafficking, sexual exploitation, and sexual abuse. Andrea is also the Director of The Reclaim Coalition at Panorama, a global movement to end online image based sexual violence.

In 2004, Andrea co-founded FAIR Girls, where she led her team for 14 years in providing case management services and establishing a safe home for survivors in Washington, D.C, and played a leadership role with the DC Human Trafficking Task Force. At Karana Rising, co-founded by Andrea in 2019, survivors lead to advance justice and healing with and for survivors who have experienced arrest and incarceration as a result of their own trafficking. Through these efforts, Andrea has served and interfaced with over 2,000 survivors of trafficking and gender-based violence in the United States, the Balkans, Russia, Bangladesh, India, and Uganda.

Andrea has a master’s degree from the University of Bonn, Germany. In her spare time, she is a multimedia artist, author, and bunny mom living with her daughter on the beach in San Diego. This is her first book.