Shay Derrick

I've been working in public service for most of my adult life, with about 10 years of experience on and off in this field. I've been a victim advocate with Bridges of Freedom for 2 years now, but I've been actively advocating for victims for about 5 years when you include my volunteer work. Before this role, I worked as a coordinator for a company called Apex during COVID, helping individuals with rental assistance when people were losing their jobs and didn't have the ability to make money. Prior to that, I worked for HLP Integrations as a trainer and project manager with the IT team, where we did litigations for the Department of Defense. We helped veterans receive their entitled benefits by converting paper claims into PDFs and TIFF files, uploading them into the system to expedite the process, because unfortunately there were a lot of senior citizens who were entitled to benefits but weren't receiving them due to lost mail. We acted as a hub to bridge the gap between families who had been trying for years to get their claims processed. I also worked for DCF for some years, helping people find food benefits, Medicaid benefits, and providing counseling for youth. Everything I've done has aligned with public service because I like helping the public. In my current role, I work with teenage girls between ages 12 and 17 who are victims of sex trafficking and have experienced significant trauma. I provide daily care, oversee activities, assist with their online schooling, help them process triggers, sit in group therapies with them, take them on outings, and monitor phone calls with family members and caseworkers. Sometimes they experience intense trauma triggers that lead to self-harm attempts, and in those moments my priority is to get whatever object they're using away from them, have a one-on-one talk, and call the crisis hotline to assess whether they need to be hospitalized. Many of the participants use me as part of their safety plan. I've been asked how I build rapport with them so fast, and honestly, I didn't come from a perfect childhood myself, so I had to learn how to cope and deal with my own traumas without professional assistance because that wasn't really a thing when I grew up. I'm able to take the things I experienced and use them to help relate, because the most important thing to them is they want to feel seen and heard and understood. I observe by nature, so I sit back and watch, pick up on certain cues, then pull them out one by one to do mental check-ins. I don't treat them based on whatever label was slapped on them - I treat them each as individuals and cater to whatever their needs are, and that's how I gain their trust.