There are boxes. Life is filled with them. Large ones and small ones, given ones and guarded ones, locked ones and lost ones. They can be difficult to open. Or they are so overly stuffed they won’t close shut no matter how hard we try.
Some boxes are so light we forget they are boxes. Others are much too heavy, and there never seems to be any place to set them down.
Local entrepreneur Rebekah Burch found a box last year. A box of change. Literally. Opening it, she discovered dozens of coins, loose change left over from her travels abroad—mostly bringing aid to Belize, Honduras, Panama and the Dominican Republic through her First New Testament Church.
Burch, a 23-year-old LSU graduate and Spanish teacher at Central High School, had been taking part in mission trips since she was 16 and blogging about her adventures with tips that ranged from the practical to the spiritual.
But each journey seemed to raise her awareness of human trafficking and the sex trade—both in the countries she’s visited and beyond—to alarming heights. Globally, 4.5 million people are trapped in forced sexual exploitation, according to the International Labor Organization.
Suddenly, looking at this foreign money, Burch’s disgust with sex trafficking, her entrepreneurial spirit and her Christian faith intersected in a way they had never before.
“I had this overwhelming feeling that basically was, ‘Women are bought with these coins every night and used for man’s pleasure and sold into the sex trade, so I want you to turn them around, make them into a necklace and sell them so that women who are pulled out of the sex trade can be told they are priceless,’” Burch recalls, still amazed by the words coming out of her mouth. She decided she could use this change from her travels to raise and donate money to an organization on the front lines of the fight against human trafficking. “It was like, ‘Where’d that come from?,’” she says. “It was a desire God gave me.”
Burch bought a drill press, made a small hole in one of the coins and wore it on a chain for months. With a donation from a member of her church, she was able to launch The Priceless Collection last May. Now she sells these simple currency necklaces and donates half of the profits to Freedom418, an anti-sex trafficking organization based in Southeast Asia. The group takes in and helps victims, who often come to them with only the clothes on their backs.
The Priceless Collection jewelry pieces are made with coins from Burch’s travels to places such as the Dominican Republic. Photo by Collin Richie)
In short, Burch’s work provides for them a place to put their heavy boxes down. And what could have remained a simple box of monetary mementos in Burch’s closet has turned into a new life for her and promises of a better life for sex trade victims who benefit from the Priceless Collection.
Rodeo Boutique locations in Baton Rouge and Ruston were the first stores to carry Burch’s necklaces. Owner Shanna Boudreaux calls it an extremely important mission.
“Our customers love when we carry products like these and when they can see their money being used for a worthy cause,” she says.
Beyond the coin jewelry, Burch is expanding the brand to include unisex leather bracelets and T-shirts, too.
She plans to partner in 2016 with Tigers Against Trafficking as well as Unbound, the anti-human trafficking wing of Antioch Church, and to visit the home base of Freedom418.
“I know if I can touch just one life, even across a great distance, this is worthwhile,” Burch says. praisinghandstravelingshoes.com
